!crossword

LA Times, Sunday, Feb 2, 2025 - "Silent Partners"

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947069-fect

SOLVED

NY Times, Sunday, Feb 2, 2025 - "Two-for-One Special"

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947074-vesk

SOLVED

LA Times, Saturday, Feb 1, 2025

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947079-jank

SOLVED

NY Times, Saturday, Feb 1, 2025

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947081-sphob

SOLVED

The Crossword: Monday, Jan 27, 2025 (New Yorker, thought I would try this. Mondays are the hardest puzzles in the New Yorker)

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947101-troff

SOLVED

Daily Cryptic Crossword (2025-02-02) (this is British but also pretty easy cryptics)

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947077-treb

SOLVED (BARELY)

MORE NEW YORKER CROSSWORDS AFTER

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947660-plash

SOLVED

https://downforacross.com/beta/game/6947719-sunt

SOLVED

THANKS FOR PLAYING

BREAKING: Ross Ulbricht has been pardoned by President Donald Trump

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 21, 2025

If you don't know who Ross is

FREEDOM!!

FREEDOM!!!! pic.twitter.com/itRuuyFAxe

— Free_Ross (@Free_Ross) January 22, 2025

It's Nigcon Nigvember but this totally isn't a chud site

Thanks Carp!

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!metashit !nooticers !chat !chatchads

Women's idea of romance is cheating

Fuck reading and anyone who can do it

— ye (@kanyewest) February 2, 2025

Just living life, man. Brock rocks

!animalposters !cats

I knew deep down, when he would never give me a response when I have tried engaging him in discussions about women's rights and everything else Trump and his cult have done, that he felt this way. How can he think this, after everything I've talked to him about with abortion bans (we have young girls), Trump's stance on climate change, Project 2025, etc.

I wish I were financially independent. I made the idiotic mistake of taking a break on my career. I work part-time and can work more next year.

I really want out. I just don't know how

From the comments:

I made a similar post yesterday and just spent an hour in my therapist's office crying because it's finally hitting me that my husband, my partner, would rather support Nazis than put his pride aside for one fricking second and admit he was wrong. And now I have to draw a line in the sand, because NAZIS, and he has forced me into this position where I either have to divorce him, or knowingly stay married to a Nazi sympathizer. And quite frankly I hate him for it

"I don't know, Trump really doesn't seem that bad"

"My therapist that I spend your money on agrees with me! You're literally at Nazi!"

I'm sorry for you and your girls. They will know their father stood by while their rights were decimated and he will have to live with that. Not that any of these men are capable of self reflection.

Most sane BreakingMom poster.

This election proved just how much men hate women. I'm not surprised at all, but I'm still a bit disappointed

i'm so sorry. men are so stubborn and entitled. they'd rather be a fascist than be proved wrong. i hope that in time he comes to his own conclusion that trump is absolutely evil and equally i hope that you find financial freedom soon. ❤️

"ur a fascist if you don't agree with me"

Solidarity. I can't leave right now either. I've really had my eyes opened by his viewpoint the last few days. I can't even talk to him about politics without it becoming a screaming match. He constant asks for sources and "where did you see that at? You're only seeing one side and well at my work women this and women that...

Trump is a Nazi!

: Source!? Do you have a SOURCE for that?!?

You're all about women's rights but what actually have they taken away from you that changes your day to day life" oh he also is a freakin racist. He 100% proved that on MLK day by saying "oh it's (person who assassinated MLK day)" and I was like WHAT? He goes, "what you never heard it called that before? Everyone I know calls it that" I was dumbfounded. I was like why because you're a racist who is surrounded by other racists??? What the heckkkkk.

We have a daughter. I just can't do this for the next 4 years and who only knows how long after. I start therapy soon. I feel like the world is going to heck and I don't know what to do about it. I'm so scared for my child.

South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land.

The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal…

— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) February 3, 2025

No way pic.twitter.com/uSPp53yT7G

— Second City Bureaucrat (@CityBureaucrat) February 7, 2025

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Good policy. Poor leadership. (-5)

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May he enjoy the rest of his life with his family. (51)

Hunter had no reason to be paid millions of dollars working for Ukrainian and Chinese energy companies, only reason was due to daddy's last name. Don't know why the left protects these corrupt politicians making millions being public servants. You only pardon people who have committed crimes... (-9)

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The deficit got better, stock market recovered, inflation reduced and unemployment fell (15)

Inflation reduced???? Huh??? (-5)

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Biden gets a bad rap, and while some criticism directed at his administration is warranted, especially when it comes to his admin's communication problems and some policies that were a bit out of touch with liberal voters, Biden achieved some things while in office, while the benefits won't be felt for years to come. (See my reply for more information)I mean, my biggest criticism of Biden was his decision to run for a second term, this put Democrats in a tough spot, and this decision, in no small part, contributed to a Trump victory.I want to recognize however, that not only was Biden stuck between a rock and a hard place when he first stepped foot into office, and thanks in part to the failures of the previous administration, as well as the economic and political fallout from the pandemic, but over the past 4 years, a portion of the American electorate have been far more concerned about their immediate circumstances than any messaging emphasizing some of Biden's successes and/or Tr... (9)

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Biden's team was solid enough. I think they were heading a correct direction for if they wanted to maintain the Neoliberal project. Waaaay too little ten years too late. And some of their calls were just... very typically center-stupid. But overall? They did a decent job considering that...... Joe Biden is irredeemably stupid and awful. And should go frick himself. He spent over a year giving Israel a free pass to do genocide and doing virtually nothing to stop it. And you can tell it was his call because every leak from the administration told that people were trying so hard to make a ceasefire. But the weak link was Joe "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist" Biden.And the election. What a selfish, awful decision. He just handed our nation's future over to NrX-types and Pseudo-Falangists because he couldn't stomach being a one term president. Because of one stupid old man, we are headed towards mid-century climate and humanitarian disaster irrevisibly. The repub... (0)

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Weak and feckless, mostly. Made the disastrous decision to appoint a gutless coward as Attorney General right off the bat, then when Trump started to rise again he, as the leader of his party, failed to organize a response. Then he backed down from a direct conflict with Netanyahu as he butchered Gazans in front of every TV screen in the world, meekly offering up "stern warnings" when he had much more powerful cowtools at his disposal.And most darning of all, his towering arrogance to run for a second term at his age because he believed he was the only person who could doomed the country to a full fascist takeover, leading to what will likely be a lot of terror, suffering, and death for Americans and everyone else.Ultimately, he failed to recognize that politics had fundamentally changed since the 80s, and tried to play by Marquess of Queensbury rules when his opponent was carrying a knife. His failure is complete and total, because anything he accomplished during his term is going to ... (1)

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FBA lessons:

There is a Nigerian dude who is selling online courses on how to look like FBAs and how to talk with Foundational Black American accents#smh pic.twitter.com/hS6wztF5Sv

— Tariq Nasheed 🇺🇸 (@tariqnasheed) January 29, 2025

True & Honest FBA's unpleased by this, but some respect the hustle

The coup and counter-coup in Korea right now vaguely reminds me of Iran in 1953.

You may have read in A People's History of the United States when your pinko high school history teacher assigned it to you, and what you've heard from every midwit in the media, that Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup plotted by the CIA to put the Shah into power because the oil companies wanted to make money. All of these things have a pretty big kernel of truth but way more important stuff was going on.

The Abadan refinery in 1950. At the time it was the largest in the world.

(I'm just gonna summarize this part really quick because it's undisputed: In 1951 Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry built and owned by Britain because they were just stealing it all and not paying royalties. The British together with the big (mostly American) oil companies organize a boycott so that other third world countries don't see this and get uppity. After two years, Iran is suffering badly because of the lack of money from oil among other things.)

Mohammed Mossadegh. He did this strange thing where he would say he was sick in bed and do his business from there. He did it even when visiting America. Maybe there was some meaning to it in his culture but if there was is it went way over everyone's head here. Or maybe it was just an extreme passive aggressive thing. You can understand why negotiating with this guy might be frustrating.

The oil nationalization thing was the big issue looming over everything, but not in the way you might think. Pretty much everyone across the different factions supported it, but there was infighting over whether Mossadegh was doing it competently. As well as a billion other issues. Iran was one of the more democratic countries in the world at the time and people had all kinds of different beliefs and things to fight over. Obviously the religious thing that blew up in 1963 with Ayatollah Khomeini didn't come out of nowhere.

Part of the fleet review for the coronation of Elizabeth II, 1953. This is the overwhelming power they were threatening to use.

Besides the situation in Iran, there was another crisis in a troubled country. Britain was still trying to figure out what its identity was after they lost India. A lot of people thought they should continue running a global empire. This wasn't some weird fringe Tory belief. Across the country there was deep resentment that they were losing their place in the world to the Americans and their anti-imperialism. Britain had been exploiting Iran's entire oil industry for about 40 years based on a deal they got through bribery and threats and paid only a tiny fraction of their profits to Iran. So Mossadegh nationalized it. The British went apeshit and told the Americans that they would have to invade because they couldn't dare lose face in front of the Orientals. So the US is trying to solve this situation without two allies going to war with each other. It's been two years now and it's deteriorating rapidly.

So Eisenhower eventually relents and orders the CIA to implement the coup the British had been begging for and partly planned. So the CIA gets together and plots with various army officers and politicians they think will back it. You can guess how well that goes. Other factions are tipped off and get their army units in the streets to put it down. The Shah flees the country into exile, presumably forever. Ironically, the whole reason why Eisenhower ordered the CIA to do all this wasn't because they wanted Mossadegh out. He was a pain in the butt but they could live with him. It's because Eisenhower was afraid the increasingly unstable, unpopular, and dictatorial regime was vulnerable to being overthrown by the communists and then everything would really go to heck. So the idea was that we would do it first.

Stuff like this was happening but with multiple factions.

But the failed attempt caused so much chaos, with tanks and various angry mobs from different factions roving around the streets of Tehran, that Tudeh (the commies) decided now was their chance and they tried their own coup, but that failed too. At the end of this game of musical chairs, Gen. Zahedi ended up in power, the guy the US had wanted all along. It's hard to say exactly how much American support helped him. The CIA was bribing newspapers and influential people in the time leading up to it which may have had some influence on events, but the actual coup they totally fricked. This all happened in 4 days.

Epilogue

Ashraf Pahlavi. Once at dinner in front of several foreign diplomats she yelled at her brother "Are you man or are you a mouse?" about some policy issue and stormed off. Would.

The Shah returned with Zahedi's permission, like a browbeaten cuck coming back from his shed. The Americans had never liked him. The CIA considered him to be a spineless coward and preferred dealing with his sister Ashraf, who was much more strong-willed and exerted a certain level of dominance over him. But something surprising happened over the next couple years. The Shah managed to lever Zahedi out of power and make himself an autocrat.

After the coup, BP was forced into giving up their monopoly of Iranian oil. They had been shamelessly screwing over the Iranians, using tactics like claiming that they couldn't pay anything because they weren't making a profit. The oil industry remained nationalized but Iran made a contract with the world's big oil companies (the "Seven Sisters") to operate it for them as a consortium. For various complicated reasons that are certainly way above your head, this meant that the Iranians got a way bigger share of the profits. It paved the way for them taking real control around 1970 and OPEC actually getting some teeth in the following years, under the leadership of the Shah to a large extent.

I dunno why monarchs these days always have to wear military uniforms. Your dad became famous for killing a lot of bandits with a machine gun when he was young, but who are you kidding?

The Shah would go on to be denounced as a puppet controlled by the US. I wish. The CIA said he had a (actual quote) "pathological fear and hatred of the British". He'd been brought up this way by his father, who had been deposed by the British. Delusional megalomaniac? Definitely. Somebody looking to be a puppet? No. CIA wasn't even allowed to spy on Iran. In the late 1970s he got cancer which he hid from his "puppetmasters" until it was too late and was overthrown. But that's a story for another time.

This is the only image of paratroopers landing in that war that Google will return now. Serious 1984 shit.

Britain, having been cockblocked out of invading Iran, was still desperate to use its (still very potent at the time) military power to thrash some wogs to show they were still dominant. This led to the disastrously r-slurred invasion of Egypt in 1956 in which the Americans spanked them and put them back in bed, ironically proving that Britain was no longer a global power that could do incredibly stupid evil stuff without American permission.

Addressing your whining

But Redactor! It was a rogue CIA operation!

Just like how sending Gary Powers out on that U-2 was a "rogue operation" until Eisenhower admitted he ordered it. This is an excuse that politicians use to protect themselves. Please grow up and don't be so naive.

But Redactor! He was democratically elected just like Allende! That should trump everything!

And then when things got tough he made himself dictator. Park Chung-hee was democratically elected. DeGaulle was democratically elected. Nixon was nowhere near a dictator but you're butthurt about him and he was democratically elected. Trump is too r-slurred to know when he's breaking the law and he's been democratically elected twice. It's funny how it's only people lefties want to identify with are the only ones who get a lifetime pass for being a dictator because they won an election once.

But Redactor! This is the reason why they hate us!

I know who obscure musician Sahba Motallevi who plays the tar is, which proves I must know what I'm talking about.

Give me a fricking break. Do you know any Iranians? They're some of my favorite people in the world but they are batshit insane about some things. I'm not usually into "Human Biodiversity" but I think they might have a genetic predisposition toward being paranoid. These are people who, when JFK Jr's plane crashed, their first question was who assassinated him. Where the Cinema Rex fire was so obviously done by Islamic militants that it must be a false flag. Where Jimmy Carter is a ruthless thug who secretly wants to stomp all of humanity under his jackboot. Where a really smart well-educated person asked me if Saddam Hussein had really gotten executed several years after it happened. They would have blamed America for something if we never did anything.

Also it's a country with a deep sense of persecution by foreign powers because they were basically colonized by Britain and Russia from ~1800-1945. Except it wasn't done openly. Everyone knew what was going on but it was behind the scenes. The kind of thing that makes you suspicious of foreign superpowers.

This kind of animosity isn't sparked by a single really complicated event. It gets into all kinds of really complicated psychology. Look at the left in South Korea and their reasons for hating America:

I wonder if a single one of these tards has ever even realized that they must have been wrong because the beef genocide never happened.

• We were really the bad guys in the Korean war. (Yet literally about 90% of people who actually lived through that think we were the good guys.)

• There was a traffic accident once and a little girl got run over by accident. (Car accidents never happen in Korea. Ajussi is totally fine to make it home after a few bottles of soju.)

• American beef has prions in it that specifically target the brains of Koreans and give them mad cow disease. (This was a real thing I'm not even exaggerating. It was a huge national issue and there were massive riots over it.)

I can't even begin to list the number of cases of people irrationally hating America when we did nothing wrong:

• British leftoids like John le Carre who were obviously butthurt that they lost their empire to America, so now they call us imperialists.

• That whole thing in France in the 1960s-1990s where their foreign policy was all about hating America.

• Indians who lived off of rice donated by America but were butthurt because we reminded them of the British or something.

• Canadians. I think that speaks for itself.

In Iran especially, their culture requires them to have a Britain to blame for their problems, so that's going to be the USA. And in South Korea they need a Japan to blame for their problems, so that's going to be the USA. (I mean seriously, hating Japan has turned into this pathogical need where some of them can't live without it.) !asians

Was it the right call?

So should we have done it? That's the $64 question, isn't it?

Eisenhower with the 101st Airborne chads before D-Day. This guy lived in a world where he had to make some extreme choices and they weren't just when to upmarsey or downmarsey.

Imagine being in Eisenhower's shoes. Stalin has just died a few months ago and presumably his heir is going to be like him. You were in a legit shooting war with the commies in Korea up until... 24 days ago. You're 8 years from leading a war on a continental level against another totalitarian regime and having to order the deaths of hundreds of thousands because that's how real shit was. There's a bunch of crises going on all over the world now. This one is especially dangerous because of the extreme strategic importance of Iran. Europe, the place you spent so much of your life fighting to protect, is dependent on Iranian oil. That war would have been a heck of a lot worse if you didn't have more oil than the other side so you know just how important this is. Given the information he had at the time and the imminent danger of WW3 breaking out, I think his decision was fairly reasonable.

Here's my view in hindsight: I don't think they should have done it. I think if there was a better understanding of Iranian culture they would have realized that there's such a large majority who will never accept communism that you don't have to worry about that unless they get invaded. They had a large portion of the population who are conservative Muslims (especially in rural areas). The educated elites liked freedom and democracy. There's actually a democratic tradition going back pretty far and while it was far from perfect it wasn't a complete joke. Beyond that, look at the virtually total failure of communist subversion throughout the Middle East. In the entire Cold War the only truly commie state they managed to take control of was South Yemen. These countries have a really good immune system against communism. Also they really really are not sympathetic toward Russia. You hear it to this day when somebody makes a deal with America and they say "It's another Treaty of Turkmenchay! !" And they are extremely nationalist. They are not interested in world socialism.

But don't take my word for it!! We have access to an actual honest assessment from within CIA about what happened.