always has been

"Liberal Democracy" is such a charged word.

It doesn't mean "liberal" in the political sense. It has a well-defined meaning (from wikipedia):

> Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.

Only because its been attacked and dragged through the mud by its enemies on either side.

How so?

its pretty clear, even from the journalist's quote, that some of the things they informed her about was not done legally (classified information).

Now is overclassification a problem too, yes but that's bureaucracy.

You are responding to a thread with the exact quotes:

> But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well.

...

> so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.

So we, in this thread, are talking about what happens to the majority of her sources that are NOT sharing confidential information or committing any crime.

population dynamics

Yeah I am suprised everyone thinks this is necessarily internal. Could equally be related to IL/USA incoming aggression.

I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.

An attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.

There wasn't really any sort of plausible protest movement going on at the time, and the strikes did result in an upswell of regime support in the short term.

It was advantagous for them to strike when they did, so they did. Its much less advantageous in this moment, so it seems less likely they will now. Or at least not overtly.

> But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?

Well yes. Countries tend to do things they think will make them more powerful. Sometimes that means blowing shit up, but that is not always the right play.

I notice that what we in the West are doing is just Countries Doing Their Thing while the foreigners are violating humanity itself.

Bluffing and theater are not reality and should not be confused for it.

Shouldn't, yes.

Trump himself makes this difficult.

He has already done things that a reasonable outsider would expect to be mere bluffs. And also TACO'ed backwards, turning things he's done into, effectively, theatrics.

>If might makes right, you've already accepted that the world belongs to China.

So what, you should just keep your head in the sand instead? Not that I accept that claim anyways (quitter talk).

Are they limited by medical loss ratios, or does that just inflate costs to get more profit?

There's a bunch of milestones, for me the standout one was managers starting to abuse marking tickets for large events as "secret" to stop people from reading their screwups. Someone leaked that the cause for some large AWS outage was someone oopsing some CLI command, and it seemed to trigger a pretty large shift.

hello fellow sociopath