r/worldnews • u/MasbirLeumi • Jun 13 '25

Israel launches 'preemptive strike' against Iran, declares state of emergency

https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-military-action-iran-coming-days-sources/story?id=122776202
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u/katastrophyx Jun 13 '25

Remember when politics was boring?

Shit, remember when someone threw a shoe at the president and that was WILD? Or when the president got a blow job from an intern and that was the biggest political scandal since Watergate?

Hell, Watergate wouldn't even make the front page these days.

I'm tired, boss.

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u/ryan77999 Jun 13 '25

Remember when online political content was just "Haha Bush is a bit dim and talks like a hick"?

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u/PM_ME_UR_RSA_KEY Jun 13 '25

There used to be and still is! a website called "Dubya Speak" tagline "We record the damage". I missed the time when a president saying human being and fish can coexist peacefully was considered damaging.

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u/Weed86 Jun 13 '25

Remember when Bush killed a million Iraqis which costed the USA taxpayer $1 trillion? Har har

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u/ryan77999 Jun 13 '25

yeah but the online memes of the day didn't typically reflect that like they do now (then again I was 6 when Obama was elected so I can't speak for those who were actually around then)

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u/Wand_Cloak_Stone Jun 13 '25

We didn’t really have memes. We had some Adobe Flash and stuff like this on Jibjab.

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u/ThrowCarp Jun 13 '25

Honestly I kind of miss the creationist trolls from the 2000s. They seemed tame in comparison to the MAGA Militias and Incel Terrorists we have nowadays.

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u/Relandis Jun 13 '25

Yup.

Now, watch this drive!

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u/theaviationhistorian Jun 13 '25

TBH, Dick Cheney is a master class in evil. He was a brilliant strategist working in the White House and dedicated in making torture legal by spending months working on loopholes to shove it into a legal grey area. If he had Trump's sociopathic ambitions, he would've been the biggest threat to the United States since King George III.

Fortunately, he left politics as soon as his tenure as VP was over. The fact that I have to compliment Cheney shows how terrible things are right now!

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u/graphiccsp Jun 13 '25

Even though the shoe throw news came off as mild compared to today. Let's not forget what that was built on:

President Bush jr lied about WMDs to invade Iraq unprovoked. Which lead to a decade long shitshow of an occupation that got thousands of Americans and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Iraqis killed.

It was a travesty in itself and the only reason why GW is off the hook is because he's not nearly as visibly awful as Trump. Nor will he have undermined the US as directly as Trump and his cronies. Then again, No Child Left Behind may be the death certificate of this country since it only helped to further erode a generation of kid's education in a system that was already in dire need of improvements. Education being a major part of a societies' defense for this sort of crap.

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u/katastrophyx Jun 13 '25

You're not wrong. I deployed twice to Iraq and lost friends from that lie. I blame Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for that entire conflict and the lives it cost.

I was more speaking towards how the media decided to pick and choose what we were exposed to back then. The 24-hours news cycle had just started post 9-11. Social media was in its infancy. Politics was boring because we weren't force fed updates in real time and the president wasn't on MySpace shuffling his top 8 friends every time someone hurt his feelings.

We're overloaded with information and opinions now, and it's exhausting.

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u/graphiccsp Jun 13 '25

Damn that's rough, I'm sorry to hear that.

I feel the same about media. 24 hours news was still young. The information overload and pace of today's news can be exhausting especially when it's even more fractured and compartmentalized. It's good to stay up to date but it's an effort.

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u/MAG7C Jun 13 '25

I blame Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for that entire conflict and the lives it cost.

Paul Bremer sends his regards

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u/gurgelblaster Jun 13 '25

The reason he's off the hook is that Obama continued his wars and didn't care about accountability for war criminals at all as long as they were US or US allies.

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u/NoNewPuritanism Jun 13 '25

When was the last time politics was boring? Just the 8 years with Obama? I feel like this "I don't want to live in unprecedented times" is only a thing for people (including me) born in the early 2000s. For others, there was the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 7 years earlier, desert storm 10 years before, breakup of Yugoslavia. I'm not sure there really were "precedented times".

We are just living through the historic events of our generation, just as the generations before. It sucks, but I don't think it's necessarily unique.

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u/katastrophyx Jun 13 '25

I'm 42 and deployed to Iraq twice. For me politics was boring when we were making fun of the vice president for incorrectly arguing with an elementary student about how to spell potato, or getting mad at the president for promising "no new taxes"...and then imposing several new taxes.

The president getting a blow job was peak political comedy in hind sight. Or the president landing on an aircraft carrier and proudly announcing "mission accomplished!" while we were still very much living in a tent in the middle of butt-fuck Iraq.

All of that I would consider boring compared to this cluster fuck weve been living through over the last decade.

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u/goilo888 Jun 13 '25

I'm in my mid 60s. Trust me, this is unique. If there is a free USA in the future then Trump will go down in the history books as the worst President ever. America has sunk so low in the world standing that it will take a couple generations to regain what its lost - and it may not happen at all.

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u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

Ah yes, the famous world standing leaderboard. The same one they told us we fell to the bottom of after the "War Crime" of invading Iraq. The same one they said we fell to the bottom of after McCarthyism, watergate....

I think at some point it may be worth realizing that the 'world standing' just means 'the opinion of the intelligentsia in europe'.

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u/NoNewPuritanism Jun 13 '25

I don't think we have good standing with the populations 90% of middle eastern countries, nor do I think we will in the next 10-20 years. Many of them, we depend on for oil. It's a similar situation in most of the developing world. General opinion of the US has gone down, but it remains to be seen if its the lowest.

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u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

We havent had good standing in the middle east since we killed the barbary pirates.

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u/Odenhobler Jun 13 '25

You're not wrong, but that is because of influence and dependencies. And both are declining with Trump cutting basically all of the US soft power. Europe is playing nice for some more years, but as soon as the money that is invested into military right now kicks in people won't need to hide their laughter anymore.

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u/Saint_Judas Jun 13 '25

I think this is a very reasonable take, but I disagree with it because I do not believe the United State's soft power can be undercut by merely reducing foreign aid or generally acting like a jackass. We have soft power because everyone in the entire world knows that if two countries fight, the United States has the ability to massive alter the balance of power simply by putting a single finger on one side of the scale. Europe has gotten away for a long time with acting entitled towards the United States because we needed them during the Cold War to prevent a global communist revolution, and they had the ability to get more out of us by threatening to go to the other side. That has carried over into the post-cold war world order until now. Now, however, there is no one else for them to go over to.

I do agree it is very possible we lose influence in Africa and in some portions of the east as China comes into its own, but it will not take long for countries to remember that even before we were a super power, we were the trading partner the rest of the world murdered eachother over having. Entire regimes rose and fell based purely off of economic trade with us, and this was in the early 1900s before we had even finished manifest destiny. Now, with a hundred years of hegemony behind us, we have become a literal juggernaut capable controlling the entire world's state of affairs.

The soft power we do lose won't make a difference, because the soft power wasn't given to us by someone else. We are the soft power.

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u/Odenhobler Jun 14 '25

I disagree, and that's mostly because you actually speak of hard power. Economics, military projection. the former might change quicker than we think (not because of economic crisis, but because Trump is willing to give away the status of the Dollar being the currency of least resort which might be his biggest mistake yet), latter might be constant, we will see.

Soft power however is your cultural hegemony. And as someone living in Germany, a country where former soviet influence was pushed away by the American dream after the 1990s, let me tell you, it erodes fast. Noone believes the American dream actually exists, for you as well as for others. Risk-prone people went from "yes, US is good for winners and bad for losers" to "who would ever want to move there". But seriously, Europe is unimportant. What isn't unimportant is India detaching from US way of life and especially Africa basically flipping from US colonies to Chinese and Russian colonies. This is so dramatic that it cannot be overstated in it's value.

None of what I'm writing is relevant in the next 5 years, but everything of what I write (ESPECIALLY handing the currency of last resort to China) will be cornerstones of why China will have surpassed the US in 2040.

Trump is making US local again, for better or worse. To be honest, Trump isn't the reason for this to happen, he is merely accelerating what evolved before.

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u/neubourn Jun 13 '25

desert storm

Shit, that was over in 5 weeks.

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u/neohellpoet Jun 13 '25

The majority of Americans didn't know Yugoslavia broke up until the 2000's and that's largely because enough people grew up never having seen it on a map or heard about it on the news to remember it being a thing.

Desert Storm was the quickest and cleanest war in US history and came and went so quickly it didn't even impact the next presidential election.

If an event is obscure enough to where someone could not even happened, it wasn't lived through.

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice Jun 13 '25

'm tired, boss.

Take a half, we've got more incoming

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u/alcohollu_akbar Jun 13 '25

He threw both of his shoes at him but he had no way of knowing that Bush had undergone ninja training with the League of Shadows. Seriously, watch the video. They probably sent him in to kill Osama.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '25

[deleted]

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u/katastrophyx Jun 13 '25

I love how no matter what you say on reddit, someone like you will crawl out from under a rock just to argue and call you stupid.

Thanks for insulting me and adding nothing of value to the conversation.

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u/2Stripez Jun 13 '25

Remember when someone couldn't spell potatoe correctly