> If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent.

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/22/poll-hamas-remains-p...

They are also the party that won the last (and only) election held by Palestinians, as well as the current rulers of Gaza.

Their explicit goal is to kill every Jew in Israel, and they have acted it out in the genocidal 10/7 massacre.

So not only do Palestinians support a party that promotes the genocide of all Jews in Israel - by all available evidence, this party is currently the favorite to control a Palestinian state.

Not to mention there's pretty solid ground to believe that if Fatah (Hamas's only viable rival) controlled a Palestinian state, they'd also support the genocide of Jews. Just look at the education they provide to West Bank children, describing Jews as subhuman monsters that must be eradicated.

They took over company offices, including the office of Google Cloud CEO in Sunnyvale, and refused to vacate them for 9+ hours.

Please don't say "communism" as they would be sent to the gulag or worse in every communist regime that has ever existed.

So the average working person is in fact worse now economically than they were 2-3 years ago. It's not just a subjective feeling, and the other positive metrics don't change that.

We all know the US military can defeat the Houthis. But so far it hasn't used its capabilities. It warned and threatened endlessly, while the Houthis continued their campaign of naval terror.

Unless this paradigm breaks very soon, Houthis seem favored to win. Pretty easy to win against a military which bogus morality won't let it harm you, its enemy.

Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.

The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.

While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?

The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.

Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.

Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.

https://archive.ph/5eZjb

The privacy issues here are bottomless, and so are the legal issues.