anti_dan
6hr ago
Compare Israels fighting with the British in northern Ireland. The Brits weren't bombing tens of thousands of people to death. Levelling an entire city while not letting people flee is beyond absurd.
#1. Why would you compare an anti-terrorism operation with a war against a state's military and police forces?
#2. Israel has repeatedly informed civilians far ahead of time of their planned incursions (again, strong evidence against genocidal intent) it is Hamas police forces that prevent them from fleeing. Because, again, "civilian" deaths are the core strategy of Hamas.
The Irish had their go many times before they won. The Algerians had their go on and off for a century before they won. There is nothing that says they won't win in the end. Israel is an infeasible nation and the Palestinian population is booming compared to the Israeli population. Combined with better tech such as drones and rockets, it is fully possible to turn Israel into a Rhodesia. If the Palestinians simply gave up, they would be genocided and removed from the area. Their best bet is to learn from the Iraqis that kicked their occupiers out.
No, if the Gazans gave up they would be a thing called the "Free State of Gaza" and would have open ports and free trade with the world. We need just go back to October 6, 2023. If on that day they had not been planning a wide ranging military incursion into Israel, Gazans would be much freer today. Indeed. If instead of launching the Oct 7 attack, they had instead went a whole year without launching rockets into Israel, I daresay they would be well on the way to being a respected member of the international community.
The Palestinians appeal to us who don't want christians ethnically cleansed from the Holy land and those who don't want a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. Israel's lobby is directly damaging the west. Palestinians appeal to us who want to see people live by the spirit of the second amendment.
Palestinian co-ethnics are the ones who have ethnically cleansed Christians from the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Giving them an additional territory will not improve the lives of Christians in the region. In addition, they are the force in the area ensuring there will be a refugee crisis. If they lose, apparently they threaten to flood Europe as some sort of blackmail. But if they win there will be 7 million Jews in desperate need of relocation as well.
anti_dan
21hr ago
I've also gotten a few of these ActBlue ads. They seem extremely low quality. This is not conservative content though, unless walkthroughs on how to install a car seat are now conservative...which...I guess?
anti_dan
21hr ago
As much as I like to castigate the western cheerleaders who help hamas, those are ultimately only good for optics.
Optics are what matters. They are losing completely the actual conflict because they are backwards barbarians inting at the windmill that is a technologically and tactically superior enemy on the battlefield.
Qatar, Iran and the normal networks of fixers all across the middle east are perfectly capable of supplying hamas with shitbottles, knives and guns. There won't be nice fancy hospitals to be photo ops after the command center underneath is bombed and there won't be images of NGO ambulances being blasted open after Hamas uses them to evacuate fighters and weapons, but there will still be kinetic action eternally from the hamas terrorists.
The former is ineffective without the latter. All you are doing is funding a thousand embarrassingly ineffective versions of Pickett's Charge. Without the West funding the equivalent of the Lost Cause narrative for Hamas they are just losers constantly throwing away their lives into pillbox fire.
There are enough mosques globally spreading unlimitedly hate against jews and hawalla networks to drive donations into arms purchases.
Preach! If we had serious leaders all of these places in the West would already be shut down or facing RICO/Terrorism charges and we'd be engaged in a systemic campaign to treat the heads of international operations similarly to how Trump treated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
anti_dan
22hr ago
The most recent story I've seen about the war is US doctors talking about how many Palestinian children have been shot in the head by sniper fire, and the parents of those children say they were shot when playing, outside or inside. The story before that was the killing of Mohammad Bhar, where an intellectually disabled man was attacked by an Israeli military dog before they kicked his family out and made sure he died without receiving medical treatment (which the family discovered when they were finally allowed back to their house to see his maggot-ridden corpse).
Anecdotes that I am sure some of which happened (although one must be clear that "US doctor in Palestine" is an entirely self-selected group of pro-Hamas partisans). But that is not data.
Most people I know in real life consider those stories and the countless others like them barbaric and disgusting - we think members of our own armed forces who do those things deserve to go to prison for the rest of their life and lose all their honours and awards in the process.
I'd hope not if they are isolated incidents caused by fog of war and genuine mistakes, as I suspect is the case.
If that's what qualifies as meek and timid from your POV, I'd hate to see what it would take for you to actually criticise them.
Given the urban nature of the conflict and known Hamas tactics of hiding their military targets in civilian areas, we'd expect a lot of objective carnage, in the numbers. PLO numbers (almost certainly inflated) have total casualties at 39k. That is 20x less than what we'd expect if Israel was conducting the conflict with a "genocidal level of brutality". 39k is the total casualty number from a particularly bad year for the Army of South Vietnam, a theater where most of the conflict was not conducted in cities.
Even if Israel was acting without genocidal intent, but merely a casual disregard for civilian casualties total death would be far FAR higher. There aren't many places in Gaza that aren't legitimate military targets (on account of Hamas storing all their munitions in hospitals, schools, and apartments), if Israel just dropped dumb bombs on every building that they had good intel had weapons or Hamas agents in, there wouldn't be any buildings over 2 stories tall left in Gaza.
anti_dan
1d ago
Id disagree with that characterization of Israeli war efforts. They are being meek and timid from my POV.
Palestinians are not like Americans. They are like Amerindians. They had their go at it and lost. They can accept their loss gracefully or get good. I have no interest in the continued terrorism where their goal is to engender sympathy with losers in the West who think being bad at life is an indication of virtue.
anti_dan
1d ago
Well I didn't write that part. But establishment media is getting far too close for comfort.
anti_dan
1d ago
We still don't have much evidence of their resolve absent the ability to appeal to western aid orgs. If NGOs had cut them off Oct 7 and said, "we are never coming back, in fact, we are taking any group who does straight to the Hauge in irons" I think it would be over. Hamas endures because they know trading Gazans for photo ops is a successful strategy.
anti_dan
1d ago
The great thing about such over the top rhetoric is I don't know what any of your ambiguous pronouns are referring to? Is it Dems or Reps being cucked? Who is fighting the brutal war?
In any case, the main problem is "humanitarian" aid to Palestine, which is just terrorist funding by another name, and since terrorism is cheap when your perps don't care about dying, it pays off at like 100k-1 compared to military aide for precision strike bombs.
anti_dan
1d ago
Seriously though why do Rs love this guy so much? He has like a 20% approval rating in Israel. Is it just because of his historical track record of disrespecting dems?
He has an enemy that is cartoonishly evil (Iran & Hamas) and he treats them as an enemy. These cartoonishly evil enemies of Bibi also love chanting "Death to America", a place Republicans famously are fond of.
The question is so odd when you evaluate it at like the level an alien would. Its almost like of there was some Byzantine general that kept smashing the Turks every time they tried to besiege Constantinople and asking why Athenians like him so much.
anti_dan
2d ago
In addition to the Axios one zataomm linked, there is this one that govtrack deleted from its own website: https://web.archive.org/web/20200816001336/https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678/report-card/2019
anti_dan
2d ago
Rewriting the past is a pretty central part of the media propaganda in 1984. This isn't some big stretch like calling Mitt Romney a Nazi is. I don't think one needs to wait for people to have rat cages appended to their faces to start making 1984 references.
anti_dan
2d ago
They are literally deleting and rewriting articles about Kamala being named border czar in 2021 and being ranked the furthest left senator in 2019. Its very much a "we were always at war with Eastasia"
anti_dan
3d ago
He didn't write the letter (likely). He probably has barely agreed to the not running part. If he is ever healthy(as much as this word applies to him) again, there is probably going to be a time where he starts (correctly) accusing people of tricking him into agreeing to drop out.
anti_dan
5d ago
I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.
Which action of his? Organizing a rally in the capital city of the polity he resides? Giving a speech at said rally? Encouraging his attendees of said rally to peacefully march to the most legitimate building to protest around in the capital city of our republic?
Trump certainly did not organize the incompetent security lines. He was not in charge of the police force that managed to let an unarmed crowd of humans sac the equivalent of an 19th century fort by checks notes walking around erratically.
We have laws which brand a person a felon if they are a threat to the public order.
We used to have such laws, and still do. They are what we properly consider felonies: Murder, burglary, embezzlement. Trump didn't do any of those things, he wrote a thing was expense type A, and the prosecutor thought it was expense type B. Neither that, nor campaign finance laws (themselves an assault on our freedom) are proof of a threat to the public order. Rather. The person making such an argument is said threat.
anti_dan
6d ago
This would turn into a boondoggle immediately, just like federal flood insurance is.
anti_dan
6d ago
That was caused by the same people who don't understand insurance moving to cities.
anti_dan
6d ago
Not at all. I have never had my ballot vetted in accordance with IL law ever since I moved to Chicago. I can go to the polling place and intentionally sign my name in a way that is completely opposite of how I signed on my registration. And they still give you the ballot without asking for additional verification of who you are.
Chain of custody? Forget about it. There are boxes stacked and intermingled and ballots spilling around.
The same is true in another city where I attended college. Reality is elections are completely insecure in cities and on campuses. The sole difference is the age of the people perpetuating the fraud/incompetence.
anti_dan
6d ago
I think if they ran one of the moderate governors like Shapiro or Beshear they would clean up. A lot of people viscerally hate Trump and a competent, clean cut white guy who can win over a swing state and doesn’t have any woke baggage would really flip the tables on the GOP imo.
I have to admit that I haven't really followed either, but has either delivered on the promise to be a moderate in the way that a Governor like Larry Hogan did? Biden in 2020 was able to sell the illusion of moderation largely because he had huge name ID from being VP, no recent record (since he hadn't done anything meaningful in 12 years), and the special circumstances of the covid campaign that let him run a sort of blank slate campaign with few rallies/appearances. As the infamous Maury Povich meme would say, "That was a lie." And a big reason Joe isn't +10 on Trump despite being old and declining is because it was a lie. If the Joe we were sold in 2020 actually was governing, inflation would never have spiked as hard as it did, there wouldn't be naked activists in White House photo ops, we'd only have one super embarrassing female Supreme Court Justice, there wouldn't be an embarrassing collapsed bridge in the Mediterranean intended to supply terrorists with stuff, etc etc.
So are Shapiro and Beshear really moderates? Have they let through 20+ week abortion bans? Have they let fracking happen when they had the chance to stop it? Have they stopped people trying to trans the kids?
The problem with running a "moderate" no one knows about is you have to establish their moderate bona fides. And usually this ends up being a lie. Sure, sometimes a real moderate like Romney or McCain gets the nomination, but they lose that luster pretty quickly when the Eye of Sauron is on them. And I have a suspicion that for relatively unknown Democrat governors, there will be little in actual evidence of being moderate.
anti_dan
6d ago
I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems.
While I understand the general sentiment, the OP's thread is about car insurance, and quite frankly, the people who don't understand car insurance should not be given sympathy, they should have their licenses pulled. Not only are these people, statistically, terrible drivers, but by not having/not having enough insurance they just are a driving externality on the road. The solution isn't to make insurance easier to understand (its already incredibly easy), the solution is to put it on the drivers exam and fail people over and over and over until they learn. Or learn that they can't learn.
anti_dan
6d ago
Stupid people get benefits from just about every governmental system that has been erected. And you are harping on one of the few that doesn't help them because they can't "this one trick" it? HSAs solve a problem caused by the government, that being health insurance mandates. Smart people use them to minimize the DWL caused by them.
That is not what I get from the article at all (despite its author's obvious bias). What we have here is a military equivalent of comstat + incorporation of tracking of specific individuals. The very act of doing this is the opposite of casual disregard for human life, because by making targets, they are necessarily excluding targets, which in this sort of conflict is a demonstration of judiciousness. There is a good case for, instead, simply engaging in creeping artillery fire and leveling every building that is a possible Hamas fortification. And that is simply a military case. Far before you would be engaged in intentional targeting of civilians.
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