That’s not what I said; my point is by widening the meaning of the word too much it loses its explanatory power. When you say that the people running Saudi Arabia (chiefly MBS) are religious fanatics, what you’re doing is taking some of their actions and using them to derive a hypothesis about the character of those people. However, for this to make sense this hypothesis needs to survive contact with the evidence or it must be discarded, and the hypothesis that—say—MBS is a religious fanatic doesn’t do that. Neither his domestic nor foreign agendas match up with someone who considers religious concerns a priority in their governance, so the situation we’re looking at (the fact that Saudi Arabia executes people for criticizing Islam) needs to be explained some other way.

So essentially you’re defining “fanatic” to mean (or at least include in its definition) “non-secularist.” That’s a possible definition of the word, but it’s not a particularly useful one, and while I could go at length into why that’s the case I’ll just say that one group of people that wanted to base the law of the land on 1500 years old superstition was early abolitionists. British sailors capturing slavers might as well have been screaming “deus vult.”* Which, you know, if that’s a group you’re comfortable calling religious fanatics I’m not going to stop you, but I think most people wouldn’t be.

*Just to drive this point home:

These dedicated Parliamentarians had access to the legal draughtsmanship of James Stephen, Wilberforce’s brother-in-law. They often saw their personal battle against slavery as a divinely ordained crusade. On Sunday, 28 October 1787, Wilberforce wrote in his diary: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

-Wikipedia.

That’s not what the word “fanatic” means, but also Sharia law is a thin veneer of religiosity that the MBS regime violates on a daily basis (you can quite famously get alcohol in Saudi Arabia, for example).

The Saudi regime isn’t “religiously fanatic” in 2026 and hasn’t been for a while. MBS is, like most other Middle Eastern dictators, going the secular-ish nationalist autocrat route these days. Besides, the idea that “religious fanatics” should have some kind of solidarity between them is very strange considering the centuries-old bad blood between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and in any case the Iranian and Saudi regimes operate completely differently.

and SA is a target because they helped trump…

Hell no? There’s a reason the Houthis are only attacking Saudi Arabia, and it’s the Yemeni Civil War. Iran helps the Houthis because they have a common enemy in Saudi Arabia, which may have something to do with Saudi Arabia having starved almost a hundred thousand Yemeni children to death. The Houthis justify their airport strikes in particular as retaliation for a (claimed, I can’t find reporting on it) Saudi strike on Sanaa International Airport, which wouldn’t be the first time. The beef between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis is real, bloody and far more than just an extension of America’s beef with Iran. The only thing that would stop the Houthis from blowing is things in Saudi Arabia is for the Saudis to stop blowing up things in Houthi-held Yemen.

Setting aside the complete lack of a source, a 66% reduction is big but it’s not “virtually disappears.” At this point this is misinformation.

Yes but this is more serving the rich. Pandering to the far right is how he and politicians/insert-favorite-animal-insult like him get political cover for doing their job, which is serving the rich.

Nah, Israeli apartheid has a hierarchy to it. Since this guy has Israeli citizenship he just gets expelled from his home while also being systematically deprived of resources, opportunity and democratic representation.

Bruh a based electing official? In this economy?

I mean BLM didn’t achieve all of its goals, but it was partially effective, but also nobody (AFAIK) went on strike during BLM. The French protests obviously have more juice here.

I’m not against shitting on Americans, but we should probably wait until the French get something done before doing so.

Fun fact: Even secular wholesome Israelis also want to colonize Palestine (though they’re sometimes less enthusiastic about genociding the inhabitants). Chalking this up to religion has nothing to do with reality and is frankly colonialist apologia.

Okay three things:

1. You are blatantly moving the goalposts right now.

2. Consumer subsidies pass to businesses anyway because they increase demand enabling them to raise prices, as seen from the American college system.

3. Almost every single entry in that article has a subsidies for businesses section.

You can’t be fucking serious. Actual gaslighting.

The violent collapse of Israel will not lead to relief for Palestinians in the short term.

How so? Presumably they won’t have time to kill Palestinians if they’re too busy killing each other, and while that is a gruesome thought it’s not more gruesome than what’s already happening.

Yeah, because European EVs aren’t heavily subsidized.

That’s a common misspelling, but no. The correct version is “Zionism is fascism.”

So two things: First, Trump isn’t a sane and rational actor, but there are sane and rational actors in the US federal government and especially Congress and the private sector (for example the media) that are doing the math on risk vs reward and coming to the conclusion that they should be backing him anyway. No man rules alone; if for example Raytheon or Amazon or General Motors thought that there would be serious consequences to their bottom line if Trump was allowed to continue, he’d have eaten a war powers resolution by now. Hitler wasn’t rational, but you don’t get Hitler without the industrialists and the industrialists backed Hitler because they were getting something out of the deal. Serious backlash from Europe would essentially unite the American capitalist class against Trump, with disastrous consequences for him.

Second, I partially took this into account, which is why I kept emphasizing actors outside the US whose consent mattered here. America can’t project power into Iran without the cooperation of its allies in the Middle East who are much more rational and much more vulnerable to persuasion/coercion by Europe. Trade are obviously very important here (particularly but not exclusively to Israel), and Britain and France maintain important defense relations with several countries in the region. The Emirates for example are an important US ally on the region and I doubt they’d have allowed this to happen (at least on their own soil) if they feared that French arms would dry up. Nobody anywhere seems to have “Europe will hate/like me for this” as part of their calculations here and that’s not the limit of the collective biggest economy in the world’s influence.

Finally an intelligent response. As a minimum culpability measure, we know that America entered this war because Israel did, and it’s undeniably Israel wouldn’t have started this war if he knew it’d cause European trade to dry up. The EU+Britain deserve at least the blame for not using that. With that in mind,

there is no chance that Iran would not have to use their biggest geopolitical leverage against them in a war.

True, but America wouldn’t have started this war if there were going to be consequences for doing so. I remember last year when Canada, Japan and the EU+Britain started selling American bonds to force Trump to back off from Greenland and Canada (which he did, rhetoric aside), so Europe clearly has options for escalation. We’ve also gotten no indication that European countries tried to pressure the countries hosting America’s military bases not to cooperate with the war (which they obviously have the leverage to do since they keep selling them weapons), and it’s entirely possible that those countries would’ve refused to allow it from the beginning if they knew it’d get them in hot water with the EU and Britain. And of course there’s no way to know if an Iran not hampered by EU sanctions would’ve had better diplomatic contacts able to stop this mess from happening peacefully, or stronger proxies able to make it foolish enough that even MBS decides he’d rather not try his luck. Maybe the war would’ve happened anyway, but it could’ve not happened either and Europe decided it’d rather not even try to prevent it.

So it’s not just “Trump and Bibi’s war” now. Well that’s about all there is to say, enjoy your imperialist boomerang.