ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I think one factor everyone is forgetting is that it didn’t actually cost much to be pro-Israel for the last 20 years. It didn’t cost much to be pro-Palastine either. Go to AIPAC conference once a year “blah blah unbreakable commitment to the continued existence of the state of Israel blah blah” pass Go, collect 2 million dollars in PAC money. Or alternatively, “blah blah illegal apartheid regime, boycotts and sanctions” all the college students clap, your leftist card is now good for another three years even though 80 percent of your votes are solely for the benefit of Raytheon. There had only been minimal violence since the end of the Second Intifada, and it looked like things would only get better in the future.
Now, supporting one or the other carries significant costs, and someone is going to hate you whomever you pick. Each choice is also going to permanently associate you with it’s own set of gory videos showing various unsympathetic behaviors by your guys. Politicians have spent the last two years trying to figure out the new reality and how to best exploit it for votes and campaign contributions. In conclusion, blah blah rational argument, blah blah updating my Bayesian priors blah blah Aella HBD whatever give me updoots.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Old pagan religions had different virtue ethics systems so it can often be easy to miss how devout these civilizations were despite all the drinking killing and whoring. Also people forget that the cynical libertine city slicker/salt of the earth rural farmer divide has existed forever, and a small strata of the urban upper class isn’t going to accurately represent the beliefs of society as a whole.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
You can see a similar paradox in the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union. The coup plotters wanted to overthrow Gorbachev to instate a more hard-line interpretation of Marxist-Leninism than what Gorbachev had in mind. So that would make them left-wing revolutionaries right? But at the same time, the reason the coup plotters wanted to do that is because hardline Marxist-Leninism was the old, established order and they were old established figures that had a large stake in the old order. So in a lot of ways Gorbachev is the young left-liberal reformer and the coup plotters that want more Marxism are the reactionary conservatives.
Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness
Old age and actually having status to lose has made them cowardly. The new school principal character South Park introduced in 2015 was basically a meta-textual admission that they just can’t do the same kind of jokes that they did in the 90s for fear of getting cancelled. Even with their criticism of Trump, they spent 10 years walking on eggshells and are only being really vicious in their parody now that much of the controversy over Trump has died down and he has safely solidified into a semi-establishment figure.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Typically when a soldier uses a garrote, the victim is pushed forward with a knee to the back, while the garrote is pulled backwards with force. This crushes the trachea to the point the airway cannot reopen, and possibly even breaks the neck. It is a useful technique for quietly and quickly removing pickets, and if you want to see a demonstration there are World War II era training films that show the technique. This is consistent with the postmortem analysis that found physical effects that differed from those you would see with a suspension hanging, and were more consistent with a violent strangulation.
This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.
Unfortunately I have been warned by our moderation staff to avoid this topic, so I cannot post my full 14 page long screed in which I accuse @Southkraut of being a traitor to all of humankind. Nor can I delve into the incredible commitment to cultural subversion it takes to cast that actress in a science fiction universe in which the defining feature of the world building is that there are NO AYYS.
Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
This is just my head cannon (I think), but I always interpreted his terrible heart condition as just him having a normal human heart and not a eugenically selected überheart.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
To be fair, this is nothing new. Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan and J.Paul Getty weren’t particularly nice people either. And the old extractive industries had the same weird semi-sovereignty where one minute you’re overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and the next Mexico is nationalizing your oil wells.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Unlike the movies, real life garrotes function by instantly crushing the windpipe, the killer doesn’t need to sit there for three and a half minutes choking the guy out. And controlling a resisting victim is pretty easy when you have three or four people.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
And the Secret Speech was pretty hard for many to swallow. Remember, it’s called the secret speech because it only went out to party members. A lot of these people had turned in friends and colleagues on the assurances that this was for a good cause.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Those are a lot of good questions. Unfortunately we don’t know the answers to them because the guards all fell asleep and the investigators forgot to ask. :^)
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Hell if I know! That’s the type of thing that is usually done in secret.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Trump is scared even if he’s not on the list, because a full accounting of the truth would have people seriously calling for revolutionary tribunals and guilotines. And not just the types that are always calling for that.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Yes, his brother had very serious alcoholism and died early as a result.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
You can’t prove that the mob killed Jimmy Hoffa either. Sure he had been in bed with the mob for years, had recently pissed them off, and disappeared on his way to meet with a high ranking mobster. But there’s no smoking gun, no witness testimony, no body. Shockingly enough the organization of professional murderers that specialize in getting away with murders made sure there wasn’t any definitive iron clad evidence of the murder.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
You are sidestepping my assertion. Blackmail isn’t needed to ensure general support. Blackmail is needed to get people to undertake specific illegal or dangerous acts.
Take Ms Maxwell: she sat around Burgerstan for a year while Epstein was arrested and dragged through the legal system, all while having citizenship in France
Maxwell was the fall guy. She’s a soldier and a patriot and could be relied on to tough out fifteen years in the federal pen for the cause. Unlike Epstein who was a flaky hedonist.
Take Clinton—his involvement seems to have been after his presidency.
Somehow Benjamin Netanyahu knew about Monica Lewinsky before everyone else and attempted to blackmail Clinton with it.
And what of Dershowitz. He’s a Jew. Is Israel blackmailing the Jews into being Jewish?
Being Jewish doesn’t automatically make you a die hard supporter of Israel. Norm Finklestein and Ron Unz are Jewish after all. And even if someone is a die hard supporter of Israel, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to be willing to dangerous illegal things to help Israel without additional incentive.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Aside from what I view to be some major logistical problems with a quick three minute in and out strangulation, though I admit I’m not well read in to the nitty-gritty.
A soldier with the right equipment can do it in seconds.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
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Conscript/reservist army. Most of the bulk of the fighting force isn’t going to be particularly well trained. And a larger percentage of the regulars are in the technical fields like the navy, the tank corps, and the Air Force. There are only about 2,500 actually well trained shooters in the whole thing, and those run into high attrition rates since they get used for a lot of the more complex tasks. In the footage I’m seeing a lot of absolutely terrible tactical malpractice. And the IDF is doing the Vietnam strategy of rotating out the troops to fast for them to learn anything.
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Decent equipment, overly reliant on tanks. Probably would have serious difficulty maintaining fuel and ammunition logistics in the event of an actual major ground war. Probably would have insufficient artillery if they could not rely on the IAF.
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Poor military culture. Israel used to have a pretty good military culture but over the past 30 years they have slipped into the American/Chinese mental model of “career military service is for losers too poor or stupid to do anything else”. So crucially, you now have incompetent undertrained draftees being led by incompetent NCOs and officers. This is what lead to the absolutely horrific failures of readiness and discipline that allowed October 7 to happen.
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It’s not actually that big. 650,000 reservists sounds like a lot, and is fine for the theater sizes they have fought in so far, but it would make attritional warfare or warfare fought over a wide theater difficult. Given the recent indications from the Ukraine War, and the fact that the last country to fight Iran ended up in an eight year long trench war that caused them 1.5 million casualties, this isn’t good.
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Overly reliant on air power. The Air Force they have is good. But it is vulnerable to gradual attrition or sudden catastrophic losses. In the era of drones and advanced ballistic missiles, aircraft are vulnerable on the ground. Again it’s also not that large only 250 fighter aircraft. It’s about the same size as the Turkish Air Force, and smaller than Pakistan’s. Air defenses have gotten a lot better, and nobody knows how well they would do at air to air since there hasn’t been much air to air for anyone in the last fifty years. And I don’t think they can necessarily rely on their opponents being absolute hamburgers in the air anymore.
Overall it’s not terrible, and a lot of these problems aren’t unique to Israel. But I think the myth of the IDF has grown so big that people have gotten a very unrealistic view of its actual size and capabilities.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I’m sure this is an opinion that will manage to piss off everyone for different reasons, but I think the IDF is highly overrated, both historically and in its current form. It’s basically what the Russian Army would be like if they had never fought in Ukraine or Afghanistan or Chechnya, and were 1/20th in size.
Their technological achievements are mostly in the field of air defense and certain high-impact intelligence operations, both of which are genuinely impressive but aren’t necessarily going to help in an October 7th kind of situation, especially when the command and communications systems have completely broken down.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
He’s talking about the recent incidents that have been occurring in the West Bank.
I’ll admit, I’ve seen political signage and iconography on both sides that’s starting to get disturbingly close to the murals in Belfast that demarcate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.
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