This is such a tired old line based on the aircraft carrier rhetoric from the 60s, outdated since the Iraq wars and our own airbases going up all over the region.

Also the idea that Saudi Arabia trades in dollars because otherwise Israel would attack them fails to take into account that much of the rest of the world uses them too, since people like a stable currency that everyone else already likes.

You guys really need to update your rhetoric.

Yeah, it was a big part of Obama’s arms control push. We slowed down due to the expense though.

Only major problem with this line of thought is it underestimates the challenges of teaching.

Teaching is about more than just providing the material, if that was enough we could have automated teaching a long time ago. A teacher has to be able to understand and diagnose the source of a students confusion, and compose a solution. This is a very complex problem, due to how much individual people vary in their thinking, experiences and knowledge base.

The word “eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The Saudis barely participated in Yom Kippur, from some brief googling they deployed a single battalion that saw a little bit of fighting in the Golan Heights. I honestly wasn’t even aware they had participated militarily.

Their much bigger impact was the oil embargo against the US, which caused rather famous gas shortages here and one of the most severe recessions we’ve ever had, during the Nixon years. Perhaps seeing the rest of the coalition demolished was enough? Though there were clear reasons for the Israeli victory that aren’t that difficult to understand. It’s far more specific than just Israel strong or something like that. That oil embargo ended up proving the power of OPEC though, dramatically strengthening the Saudi’s position on the global stage, which persists to this day.

Regarding NG, the main pipeline through the area for exporting Egyptian NG actually takes some pains to go around Israel, rather than through it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Gas_Pipeline

I guess you don’t think our politicians care which of them are in charge? And I’m not so sure about ironclad, we’ve withheld aid in past decades.

I really question exactly how Israel has significant influence over Egypt. Much less Saudi Arabia, which isn’t even a neighbor and has significantly more wealth and influence than Israel does.

If Israel was that useful as a tool to control Egypt, sure would like those billions of dollars back…

And I have a feeling they’ll have some consequences. We may not all see the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict the same way, I have a feeling you’re not aware of any of the Arab atrocities from the early 20th century, before Israel was ever a nation. But this time they’ve lost a lot of support in the US for the first time in our history, and that will likely have an impact on future political calculations.

This betrays a startling lack of awareness of just how extensive US partnerships are across the globe. The US has sent tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Egypt. Close ties with Saudi Arabia. Close ties with Morocco. Most Mediterranean countries are in NATO, actually. This isn’t even to speak of our own military bases littered throughout both Africa and the Middle East.

Does anything going from Asia to Africa even go through Israel? I’d think they’d usually take sea routes through the Indian Ocean. Do we really need some unsinkable aircraft carrier anymore when we have literally dozens of our own airstrips all over the region?

That said, I do agree with your first two points. Ukraine is a proxy war, and supporting Israel is the point. Not sure it’s actually more important than any actual US territory though.

Yeah, I thought the headline was a little fishy.

New Scientist had been going downhill for years, but in 2021 it was purchased by the Daily Mail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist

Another advantage of text, for me at least, is that I can read much faster than I can listen. This is why I prefer text articles to news videos, even though video can often offer extra visual information over what photographs can offer.

That said, I do somewhat agree with the article’s concern that live conversation is an independent skill and potentially has its own unique side-benefits that might be becoming rarer.