That would be more in line with the actual American tradition.

But personally, I would recommend to only allow filibusters in the House, which has a more proportional representation, and to not allow it in the Senate, which has the least proportional representation, even less than the electoral college.

Also, having been on the other side of such a situation: it’s not cool to pressure or guilt trip your guests. Either be hospitable and let them do whatever they want, or don’t invite them.

If people aren’t hungry, then they aren’t hungry. Maybe they are on a diet, maybe they misunderstood OP’s intention and ate beforehand. Maybe they are recovering from something and don’t want to eat too much.

And as for the two that did not showed up. It’s a good practice to reconfirm the night before. Sometimes people forget. Sometimes life gets in the way.

If they did reconfirm and still didn’t show up and did not have a good excuse, then I would start looking for better friends.

Hope OP has better success next time. I do understand that the situation sucks.

But it’s also a situation that, in my opinion, is preventable.

Exactly. Every time the UN does something, people say “they can’t enforce it”.

Well, that’s the whole point of the UN. To resolve things without using force.

It’s a good design, designed by people who learned from the horrors of WW2.

It’s sad to see how many people nowadays forget those lessons and are itching for global war.

Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.

A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.

The only country that can be blamed for destroying Iraqi industry is the USA. Two decades of war, one decade of sanctions and another decade of war (by Saddam against Iran) sponsored by the USA in the 1980s.

Obviously, Iranian industry will outcompete Iraqi industry at this point in history.

Iraq needs to rebuild and they need outside help.

I’m not gonna defend Iranian war mongering. And neither will I defend Turkish war mongering, or IS, USA or Israeli war mongering.

But the only path forward for Iraq is by making peace with the two power brokers in the region: Turkey and Iran.

And that’s what the current government is trying to achieve. The Turkey-Iraq corridor and the new port they are building are going to lay the foundation for their future prosperity.

As for Iran, Iran is desperate for allies. It won’t be that difficult to find some mutually beneficial relationship with them.

It’s more-or-less geographic destiny that Iran and Turkey will become the dominant powers in Western Asia.

They both basically ruled the area for most of history.

The best we (the West) could do is nudge them towards human rights and peace and friendship. For Turkey, that’s mostly a done deal.

For Iran, that was exactly what Obama tried to do. And it’s also what Iran has been trying to get for the past 25 years.

Iran is inherently on a path towards secularisation and more dovish policies. It’s the threat of war by the US and Israel that keeps the defense hawks in power.

Iran, especially, will never fully trust the USA - and for good reason. But they do want better relations with the USA. They just don’t want to get burned or bombed.

The US never did anything about Rachel Corrie or the USS Liberty or Hersh Goldberg-Polin. And we can probably add hundreds of Palestinian Americans to the list, but even their names aren’t known in the mainstream media.

It seems the USA capacity to care depends on how much AIPAC will allow it to care.

They aren’t combatants or PoW, taking them hostage was a human rights violation from the beginning.

But Israel can’t really expect Hamas to follow Geneva conventions when they themselves violate it a hundreds times as often.

Because they manage to attract investment.

As long as investors are willing to give cash in exchange for equity, a company can operate on that cash and run at a loss.

Look, I wouldn’t trust the GOP with my shit stained underwear.

Of course they don’t have a better plan.

But voters who vote for them are still voters.

And falling for a false narrative doesn’t make them hypocrites.

In their mind, they are voting for the party that will fix it.

You may disagree, as do I, but that’s what they think.

Hamas is trying to keep as many alive as they can.

But (a) 2000 pound bunker busters don’t discriminate between Palestinians and Israelis and (b) if the IDF comes too close to the hostages, their guards have to decide whether to let them go alive or to kill them.

In the case of the Druze guy, I can definitely see Hamas choosing not to kill him. But in cases of Israelis who also served in the IDF, the rational choice is to kill them instead of giving the IDF a propaganda win.

And finally, sometimes the IDF probably accidentally kills them and tries to blame Hamas if they can get away with it.

They could have had all the hostages back in October. Hamas just wanted back the hostages that Israel holds.

And again, they could have had all the hostages back in May.

Netanyahu seems committed to genocide and the hostages are collateral damage.

It’s deranged and I am ashamed our western leaders are cheerleading this.

To be fair, it’s a flawed argument.

You can be against Google and Apple and still use a smartphone.

You can be against a genocide being sponsored with your tax dollars and still work and pay tax.

And yes, you can use the healthcare system that exists today and still want a different one tomorrow.

Or do you think that advocates of universal healthcare are also hypocrites for using Obamacare?

It always surprised me that the country that pioneered Lean production techniques has always had such an enormous waste of labour resources in their office culture.

They have one of the lowest GDP per hour worked of all Industrial nations.

Italy, Spain and Germany have way higher labour productivity, while even Turkey edges out Japan.

Not Bibi, but AIPAC and CUFI.

And also, the Democratic party itself is quite Zionist, with Blinken en Shapiro perhaps the most well known Zionists.

Democrats don’t want AIPAC and CUFI to support Trump. Wavering on Israel will actually rile up the evangelicals to turn out massively for Republicans.

The sad fact of the matter is that 75% of the American electorate will support Israel regardless of how many kids they kill.

And the remaining 25% are actually split between Republican and Democratic voters and don’t hold sway in either party.

One thing I don’t understand is, how can polio resurface after 24 years?

I am tempted to think that it was intentionally released, but perhaps someone has a less evil explanation?

I do find it interesting how much press it gets. Especially since Iran is quite capable of hiding their tracks better.

I think the goal of Iran was to get caught, so that if the election is close, one side will accuse the other of the election being stolen through help of Iran.

It might even be Russia or China framing Iran to be honest.

And I think the US is widely sharing this information to beat the war drums and have cause to attack Iran for election interference.

Correct.

But nobody is enforcing compliance.

So they can just keep it on American servers and sell it to OpenAI or share it with the US government.

Also, there are a lot of bots copying everything on reddit and other sites. Even if reddit would comply with GDPR, these bots cannot be traced and cannot be fined.

I agree, but I saw you had some down votes.