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The Most Active Threads Since Friday
The topics with the most engagement since my last blog post included Iran's retaliation against Israel, a report in the UK about gender affirming care, a bike lane on Connecticut Avenue that is not happening, and things that others desire that you don't want.
The most active thread over the weekend was titled, "Now That Iran Has Retaliated Against Israel?" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The thread was started Saturday afternoon when the media began reporting that Iran had launched an attack on Israel. When the thread was created, details were sparse and the Iranian weapons — which subsequently turned out to be a combination of drones, cruise missiles, and rockets — were still in the air. Therefore, much of the early discussion in the thread occurred before anyone knew the results of the attack. The original poster argued that Iran's attack was to be expected because Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic building in Syria, killing several Iranian military figures. The original poster further expressed his opposition to the US getting involved in the conflict because he is sick of "my tax dollars being used to clean up Israel’s disastrous missteps." Threads of this sort have become absurd farces. Never mind that posters were making policy suggestions before the outcome of the attack was even known, these threads now attract a consistent collection of weirdos. There is a poster who blames everything on "globalists" who he sees as having a full agenda of items he opposes. Another poster constantly blames "dual citizen" politicians, by which I assume he means "Jews". The anti-Israel posters on DCUM represent a motley crew of right-wing conspiracy theorists, dithering liberals, and left-wing zealots who seem to oppose just about everything. There is considerable consternation about President Joe Biden's close embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who almost everyone opposes. Biden has created a predicament for himself. Conservatives who view him as a bumbling senile fool naturally oppose him. Many Democrats, alienated by the President's Middle East policies, are frustrated with him. Only a tiny group of supporters who appear willing to ignore anything other than Biden's support for abortion rights continues to defend him. Most of those posting in the thread expected that Israel would retaliate against Iran and a cycle of tits for tat would commence and naturally suck in the United States. This was primarily blamed on Biden. On the other side of the debate were the pro-Israel posters who themselves have devolved to ludicrous caricatures. Their single argument appears to be that anyone who criticizes Israel is, at best, a Hamas supporter — or in this case an Iran supporter — or, at worst, an anti-Semite. Many of them also oppose Biden who they, incredibly, view as anti-Israel. As it turned out, a coalition of Israeli, US, United Kingdom, Jordanian, and Saudi air defenses shot down most of the Iranian weapons. I think the exposure of the Jordanians and Saudis as Israel's body guards is probably the most stunning aspect of this entire event, but the ramifications of that may take a while to appear. Then, according to reports, Biden told Netanyahu to take the win and not to retaliate. We will see how long this lasts, but for the moment World War III has been avoided, much to the surprise of most of the posters in this thread. Even more incredibly, it appears that despite the concerns of most detractors, including me, Biden may have pulled off a foreign policy success.