anti_dan
4mo ago
Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron.
Do you think we live in such a world? I am American and can assure you we do not. We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war. Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip and the annexation of all the land towards the Jordan would have begun. And it would have been done with fewer Israeli casualties than the current war, and it would probably have been over 3 decades ago.
Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped.
Yes indeed, as a result of "humanitarian" causes the US and Europe impose on Israel.
If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border
The post 10-7 war can hardly be described as intense combat. Kid gloves at best.
the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine.
Lack of punctuation aside, this is just incorrect. All that antisemitism already existed. I knew about it on 10-6, we saw it on 10-7 before they launched a single counter-attack.
anti_dan
4mo ago
That doesn't look like it to me, so why would it be the default assumption?
What it looks like to me is Israel is fighting with two hands tied behind its back. What they, IMO correctly, perceive is that most of "the international community" doesn't want them to win, nor would it tolerate them using META strategies in furtherance of an Israeli victory. So what they end up doing, and we end up observing, is a bunch of tiny motions in the direction of victory that advance the goals of Israel a little bit at a time, while mostly carefully avoiding any dramatic moves in that direction, which would have a high likelihood of generating massive blow-back, even if there was no alternative plausible avenue to generating whatever that strategic gain is/was.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Google glass was tried like a decade ago. This is just that, incognito, with less features, right?
To me it seems kinda lame, and POV video sucks.
anti_dan
4mo ago
The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.
I worked in medical device development early in my career. Its not that these are not very impressive technological innovations, it is that people were perfectly capable of living to their 80s in 1776, and the reasons so few did had largely been addressed by the 50s. Lots of development has been in surguries. I'd much rather have surgery now than in 1955.
Ill freely admit I am a bit biased, my work was in life saving pediatric implants, which is not nearly the size of the "relieve grandpa joe's pain a little bit" part of the industry.
anti_dan
4mo ago
But they bear no resemblance to the thing the commune person is thinking about. Modern seamstresses are either high end bespoke precision craftsmen making suits and/or dresses for multimillionaires and politicians, or for the majority, factory workers outputting thousands of articles a day. Neither is stress free at all, if you mess up slightly at the bespoke place the client and your boss chew you out, and you might get eventually fired. If you are slow or mess up at the factory you get docked pay and eventually fired.
The difference between the commune fantasy and many others is other types of fantasy jobs do have significant intermediate level positions. I can want to be on the Supreme Court, but then I only score 165 on the LSAT, I can work a solid career and eventually become a local judge. Or maybe I'm not even that level, I can still become some hack PI/Family Law/DUI defense attorney. Many types of aspirational jobs are like this. Sports is a well known tournament profession, but my friend has ground out a solid living as a tennis instructor after his college stint in D2.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Basically everything that actually gives us longevity now was invented by 1950. Clean water, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines. There have been some significant developments in childbirth, but obviously that part alone is not the cost driver. It is end of life care, subsidies to hypochondriacs and the poor, and maintenance treatments like lifelong blood pressure meds and dialysis.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Still, one only need to go to a criminal courtroom to observe that tattoos on females are indicative of criminality. A while back I was in court and a woman had been arrested on a fairly old warrant. It wasn't violence per se, but she made a stupid video of herself shooting a gun into the air. The kicker is it had one of those cheap auto-switch adjustments so it is technically an automatic per statute. She was, of course, 4 months pregnant and engaged. But she also had tattoos, the same ones from the video. So what do you do with a 22 year old who is clearly more mature than the 19 year old who was a reckless idiot, and also eligible for a very long prison sentence.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Who would spin up this? Israel's current western opponents certainly would not unless it was the US that attacked Israel.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Not at all. If the international community was neutral, all the Gazans would die of their own inability to produce any food or trade of value. They only exist as an entity because of large influxes of foreign aid.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Genocide and/or Ethnic Cleansing of Israelis has widespread supermajority public support among Palestinians. So does does destroying America. The extrapolations from such things are not hard.
anti_dan
4mo ago
They could, however, be called "Egyptians" with no major disruption to that polity, which many of them, or their ancestors, once were. The reason this doesn't happen is because having rump "Palestinians" as a grievance group is an intentional tactic.
anti_dan
4mo ago
It seems to be every international org, and every unbiased org, any unaffiliated with Israel, that have been testifying the same thing. Why would Swedes or Japanese or American Baptists all be lying? The UN, in the link at #3, is saying that their own staff face hunger and “hospitals have admitted people in a state of severe exhaustion caused by a lack of food.”
Israel has always been disliked by basically everyone because "Jews" aside from American conservatives who either A) Recognized Islam as a greater threat; or B) Were religious fellas hoping for a restoration of the holy land, eventually. Or maybe the rapture.
There are very few actual option in this situation. Gazans, by a vast majority, want a genocide of Israel. Israeli's are a split bunch, some want genocide of Gaza, some want peace, and some want to genocide themselves. The people who want peace cant get it. So long as no magical entity comes and brainwashes the Gazans into thinking Jews are cool and good neighbors (see, for example, the fictional jutsu kotoamtsukami it will continue to be. We then are left with two permanent solutions, being genocide of either side. Lay down your chips, which would you prefer?
anti_dan
4mo ago
Probably the morally correct number. But what is the militarily correct number? That is, the number that Israelis should expect to be alive after a successful campaign in which a functional, strongly anti-terrorism regime rules that territory.
I suspect the number approaches zero.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Indeed, and it should not. 5 years to score 600 on the LSAT English section or the boot, minimum.
anti_dan
4mo ago
It's as if a large portion of the American Right has entirely forgotten the lessons of Cold War diplomatic and military strategy. Or very, very obvious game theory re: bluffs and tit for tat.
Trump and his people are very much tit for tat. Look at what they've done to Iran and the Houthis.
Instead what you are ignoring is that the American Right has learned from the past 30 years that if America and/or its Allies are winning a war, the left will start calling American (or other) soldiers, generals, and political leaders war criminals and start calling for disarmament, the end of fighting etc. So until Democrats have approximately the same political power nationally as Republicans currently do in San Fransisco, war is kinda pointless.
anti_dan
4mo ago
This post reminds me of the "His name was Robert Paulson" scene from Fight Club. Just a heads up.
anti_dan
4mo ago
My hometown was a very less egregious version of this. Well, sort of hometown. We moved there from an adjacent town when I was in 5th grade. By the time I got to HS the immigrant population had jumped pretty significantly such that about 15% of freshman struggled with English. Violence was not a problem at school, we had a sufficient supply of jocks and racists that made it clear to them (at the time) that there would be reprisals. I recall one such when a 15 y/o illegal grabbed a girl's tits, and the football team broke his leg and his bike. This influence kept them mostly sidelined from the time I was there. By my youngest sibling's graduation though, it was more like 25% and it was becoming a real problem. And like you said, DUI is actually the biggest problem. It is out of control, no DL, no INS, 15 modelos in the back seat. They then just don't come to court and go to some other town, or just hide till hopefully (for them) the SOL runs out or the cop retires and wont be able to come back from Florida for a class A misdemeanor or CL4 felony (depending on what was actually charged).
anti_dan
4mo ago
I do wonder where, when, and why "community organizer" was coined. Among the euphemisms for fake jobs that are out there is isn't a particularly good or effective one. The first time I recall hearing it was with regards to Barak Obama during his senate run. No one seemed fooled. Maybe a few people hung onto it to avoid thinking they were not voting for an unemployed grifter, but I don't see that as having been a significant number of people, it was a 2005 IL senate DNC primary. People were expecting a grifter.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Poors shoplifting for personal consumption happens (particularly for booze) but isn't what is closing grocery stores.
I agree. Tide pods I know are big, as is the alcohol in resale.
anti_dan
4mo ago
That is a fair point. Meat still is harder to fence than booze, and does need to be kept fresh.
anti_dan
4mo ago
The WSJ is going to have a copy of the letter they can carbon date to 2003? Anything less than that with a good COC is useless. Dozens of people have already made convincing hoaxes using the WSJ's piece as source material.
anti_dan
4mo ago
I think the WSJ article was probably an unforced error on their part. They have no way of proving the fidelity of this alleged document in court without burning their source, and there really is no journalistic justification for source anonymity in this case either. Selective leaking of documents involved in a criminal investigation are not something a responsible publication should be doing. I know many do it. And Watergate is, for some reason, considered peak journalism. But really this sort of thing is peak hackery.
Starving babies is incidental to the overall strategy. There is no way to starve Hamas without starving babies (that we have found) because Hamas rules the territory, thus Hamas always eats first, and second, and third, then maybe a few babies get some morsels.
With something this complicated it is incumbent on critics to offer at least the skeleton of an alternative proposal so that it can be critiqued. Just saying something is bad is woefully inadequate. Do you think Israel hasn't had a meeting where someone brought up the point that starving children is not good optics (at the very least, if not also brought up the morality of it)? Of course not. They've had hundreds of such meetings. Notably the people who were giving aid to Gaza before didn't really even try to ask the question of "how do we get food to civilians without paying and feeding Hamas?" They just were like "here Hamas here is a buffet and some rocket assembly materials."
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