Unknown, no one has really been asking about that yet. So far, most polling I have seen has been entirely under the assumption of "Only air strikes, no ground troops". I dont imagine too many people would care what happens as long as we dont have our own troops there to do it though, since it isnt really our problem.

Him and Barris both identify that a lot of pollsters suck with their methodology and have approval of the each others methods.

Oh, I wasnt trying to imply that Mark and Barris are somehow opposed to each other. Just pointing out that they are both good people with good methodology coming to very different conclusions. It is just to show that its not quite as solid as some people are making it out to be and that it is entirely possible that the this is all a tempest in a teapot as far as MAGA goes. Or that one faction is actually a lot smaller than we thought and we will find out which in the near future.

I think you're right that MAGA is probably okay with limited air strikes, but the concern is how can Trump actually keep those air strikes limited with this much pressure...I don't think they're wrong to be freaking out. Considering Trump couldn't stop his generals in Syria from launching offensive operations without his knowledge (due to their own subversion and treachery), the idea that he can keep this from spiraling is skeptical at best.

I think the advantage he has in this regard is that there are no ground troops to use like there were in Syria. It's one thing to give the order that American troops are supposed to be pulled out and have some Deep State type say "Nah, we are staying." but it is another thing entirely to find a way to get troops in there that didnt exist in the first place. We may see some "Get in, get out, Operator Shit" shenanigans go down (and lets be honest: most normal people wouldnt consider that "boots on the ground" for the purpose of policy), but I dont foresee the usual suspects being able to sneak a MEU up into Iran and say "Oh, how did that get there?" Which is why I think it is smart that he is keeping this entirely restricted to the Air Force if we are sending in anything at all.

One limited air-strike against Iran's nuclear facilities might be acceptable to MAGA, but the longer it lasts, and the more involved it gets, I suspect it could poison the administration.

I continue to say I am more skeptical it causes long term damage to MAGA. Again, just basing it entirely on anecdotal evidence, I saw far more people upset with the tariff war than with this current thing, with all of them saying the only way they would get angry and turn against Trump is if said MEU rocked up on Iran and started invading by land. But as long as it remains airstrikes, they think this is a grand old time and even meme worthy. So I dont really see a path to MAGA poison unless Trump does something entirely out of left field and completely out of character for his "Peace Through Strength" doctrine he has utilized for 10 years now. Since his entire game thus far has been mercing fools with either an air strike or the aforementioned "Operator Shit" types, and then going on live TV and saying "He was a sniveling bitch, and died like one too, check out this killfeed."

I'm not part of the "nothing ever happens" brigade, but I'm curious about how much of a show this really is, and I wonder if anyone actually knows outside of maybe him, Vance, and possibly Rubio.

If you believe some of the stuff that has been leaked out recently by some of Trumps people, apparently he has been part of the mascarade with Israel for a few weeks now since he realized he was hitting roadblocks with Iran, and he was trying to make them get lazy and stupid to set them up for a killshot from Israel. Including coordinating with Netanyahu on how best to make sure certain Iranian officials would be in the perfect spots for Israel to get easy kill shots on them when they went for the kill. Which again, at least to me, seems to continue to be more in character with how Trump has been this whole time. As for what happens next, considering Iran is entering Imperial Japan levels of delusional at this point (saying they will only return to negotiate if the US condemns Israel and allows them to continue enriching Uranium), I foresee that we are going to make our limited striking being to MOP their last major enrichment site, and tell the Ayatollahs "Unless you give up, you're next." And then we either merc them too and that's that, or they finally pull their head out of their asses and surrender. After that, maybe it returns to status quo, maybe they get dragged into the street by people who decided they would rather be Persia again. Dont really care, not really our problem. Unless they do actually become Persia again, then I may want to ally with them so we can finally stop dealing with the Saudi's.

At the same time, Mark Mitchell and Rasmussen (not exactly a traditional ConInc sources and quite accurate in his past polling) are finding 84% approve of stopping Iran from getting nukes, with 63% strongly, as long as it remains at eliminating Iran's nuclear potential. And furthermore 57% favor direct US military strikes as long as it remains at targeting only their nuclear facilities. And at least from purely anecdotal evidence, that does at least track with my own life, where most people who are against it already hated Trump while most people who like him are saying "As long as there are no boots on the grounds, this is great show." and also being happy about him pulling up on Twitter to effectively tell the Ayatollah "I know where you live."

So we will see how it shakes out in the long run, but I am willing to actually believe there is more support than a lot of the Online Right is giving it credit for. Because I dont think it is actually that dissimilar to what me and a lot of people actually thought MAGA meant, which can be boiled down to "The United States is in fact the main character, and we are tired of pretending otherwise."

Its almost like, the National Socialist were still Socialist, and White Niggers are still White Niggers.

There is a part of me that finds that extra funny since ZZZ is the one that they went unapologetic on the horny bait with the characters and therefore the one that pisses off the usual suspects the most already.

Looking into it more after more information has come out, it looks like I was wrong and it was refueling over Syria and Iraq instead of in Iran itself. So that is my bad on faulty early information.

As for the Iranian Air Force being grounded, it was less that they got bombed so hard they couldnt get airborne, and more that between their CIC being wiped out and their pilots refusing to get airborne (either due to lack of orders or fear of fighting the Israeli's much like what happened with the Iraqi's vs. the US Air Force) they were grounded in all but name.

I agree. For me, there is a bell curve of boob size (weighted around C-DD) and once you get over something like H cup it starts to loop back around to becoming unattractive (dependent on proportion to body style, obviously). While I am not going to do some fedora-tipping pretend answer and say looks dont matter, I completely agree that personality and face are far more important to me than the overall body...even if that is still important.

and it all came at a price to Israel of a few dead and 7 failed interceptions.

The Israeli's also showed they have near total aerial supremacy over Iran. There was GPS confirmed reports of the Israeli's doing airborne refueling runs in Iranian airspace! That is a degree of both disrespect and establishment of your power that is rarely achieved in the real world. And tie that in with the Israeli's grounding the Iranian Air Force with their mere presence I think it definitely establishes the superiority of American (and to a lesser extent NATO) air power in the future.

Good to know then.

On the other hand, consider the caliber of some of the DEI hires that have hit the industry in recent years.

Yeah, like I said in a different post, I have always leaned that way. And characters like Eve or 2B arent necessarily outside of my preference zone, like I said they just dance on the line. But when those are the only options left to get attractive women, you get what you can. Actually, funny enough, that Expedition 33 game that came out, I havent gotten a chance to play it yet, but all of the female characters in that that I have seen in screenshots are very much the kind up my alley and I hope that its success leads to more looking like that in the future.

Strangely, I always leaned that way even as a teenager. I am still a straight guy, it is not like a mostly naked woman is going to be a turn off to me, it is just that it's...boring. Its hard to describe, but just seeing a woman in a bikini for me was always just "Ok, you're sexy. I guess?" Meanwhile, looks along these lines to be significantly more appealing and sexy than just letting it all hang out. Perhaps something in my psychology get set from a young age and continued on, because that is all I can think would do it.

The amazing thing is, I am generally more modest in terms of what I like for looks. Something like Stellar Blade or Nier would have and in many ways still do push the line of what I find attractive, dancing on the line of going over the edge to trashy.

And yet, because of people like these journos, I am defending them for no other reason than they at least are more attractive than anything else that has been made by what the Journos would want. And that is sad to me.

If I had to place a bet, given their history, Israel warned the Americans that they were bombing Iranian targets 12-24 hours ago, and that was the first news the Trump admin got of it.

Maybe not. Or at least, if it was Trump has accepted it. Since now Trump is today out there saying effectively "I warned you" to Iran and at least publicly doesnt seem too taken aback by this whole situation. So it is seeming that his attitude toward a lot of what Israel is getting up to "I'm not going to help you. But I'm not going to stop you either." and quite frankly I think that is probably the most productive way to handle the situation as we try and get more countries in the Middle East to move toward no longer viewing Israel as an enemy that must be destroyed (like we have largely accomplished with the Saudi's and Egyptians).

At least from what I have heard, there is a possibility that we are giving non-combat support (like airborne tankers or targeting data) but that we largely told the Israelis they are on their own if they want to do anything.

I also dont know how much it would really change his relationship with the Israelis or Netanyahu. I very much doubt he would be happy about this, and I still think he would have rather had a peaceful solution. But it is worth pointing out that in the last day or two he was seeming more skeptical any negotiations would get anywhere with Iran and had flatly said "Iran will not get Nuclear weapons, under any circumstances." So it's even entirely possible this could be Trump turning to Netanyahu and saying "You want to make yourself useful? Then shit or get off the pot, and stop bugging me about this."

We also have a definitive answer now as if this was about doing something to set peoples ideas and set up a new party, it fell flat on its face as a bare single-digit percentage of people are siding with Musk over Trump (Trump being over 70%). Honestly, I am absolutely of the opinion that he has a drug problem (as it has been repeatedly talked about even before he was in politics), he crashed out while on that ketamine rage energy, and then had post-crashout clarity and realized "Oh shit, I fucked up" which is why he is trying to talk it back and make olive branches to Trump (who is thoroughly unamused from the sounds of it).

The official announcement is that it is Bijou, Ina, and IRyS.

I foresee significant amounts of flailing on this topic as the pro-Palestine side continues to radicalize. Gotta do anything you can do deflect the blame when the people you agree with are the ones frequently committing domestic terrorist attacks and the amount is growing.

He assumed that due to Stalin's unpopularity in the East, he'd be able to steam-roll any Soviet vassal armies.

To be fair, he technically wasnt wrong on that one. It was well documented that a lot of the armies that were heavy in non-Russian ethnic groups (Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Polish, etc) did just mass surrender to the Nazi's, or turned their guns around and joined them. And it is true that many of the people of those areas did indeed welcome the Wermacht as liberators and showered them with gifts and recruits, as well as promises of anti-partisan militias.

But like you said, that goodwill was almost immediately covered in gasoline and set on fire pretty much as soon as the SS showed up and started doing SS things. And suddenly, what had once been pacified territory that required a token garrison was now completely destablized and rife with guerillas at a time when the Wermacht could ill afford such a situation, and they never recovered from it.

Which, if anything, shows why pragmatism will almost always win out over dogma in the long run.

Fair point, but that is a consequence of poor spending habits and not necessarily poor policy like it would be with what the Left wants to do.

I think they really do, because I have heard from so many sources in Democrat circles of all of their people who decide the direction of the party continuing to say their policies are fine, it is just a messaging problem. Not realizing that it very much is a policy problem, not a messaging problem. They even say it in that very video. "Most men are pro-choice, pro-immigration, and pro-BLM, they just dont vote for us because we have turned them off by making people think we hate them." Meanwhile, poll after poll shows that men are none of those things, and are absolutely against everything the Dems actually stand for, and no amount of sugar coating it will make them accept it.

She is apparently supposed to be their "man whisperer." No, I'm serious. She is totally great at chatting it up and flirting with the frat boys, trust me bro.

So we recently heard that the Dems are throwing down $20M to figure out why they cant connect with male (especially young male) voters, and this is apparently one of the early talks. Within this whole discussion we have (but not limited to):

• Hiring a woman to tell them what men want (lol).

• Dem's policies are fine, it is just bad messaging that makes people not realize they would like it.

• A soyboy cuck declaring men want to be bad and do bad things like dominate and rape women, and Republicans do well because they indulge in that impulse.

• She-Troll thinks that being an oil field roughneck and an Amazon warehouse worker are the same tier of job. Also thinks that said roughnecks are struggling to make ends meet despite being one of the highest paid jobs in the country.

• Both are extremely dismissive of immigration and think that people only think it is a problem because they were told it is one.

• Both think the problem Dems have connecting with voters is because they come off as "dorks" who are overly concerned with policies, instead of connecting emotionally with voters "like Trump does."

• Ultimately, they conclude that the solution is to start pandering to male voters like they do other racial and gender groups, but make it so that it doesnt sound like pandering as that does turn off male voters.

I guess from that point of view, that is true (and I wasnt trying to imply otherwise).

I was more thinking of the fact that he is generally very lanky and has tended to have some baby-faced features in many of his depictions, rather than a more Western style "grizzled hero" look. Which makes sense due to the elf-like nature of both him and Zelda, but like you said some Western people take that in a different direction and make it into something it isnt.

To be fair, that at least makes sense as Link has been kind of twink-ish in several of the games.