Of course, Israel is a pure white dove. For instance, they have rallies for "the right to rape prisoners" (and recently to kill them) [0]. Or to willingly mutilate peaceful protesters presenting no risk[1].
The problem is that the total lack of moral limits in Israel only forces their opponents to escalate, or accept to be treated like animals (in the case of the West Bank Palestinians). It also affects the US, since that they have to follow along with Israel' way of doing the war (mainly, war crimes).
The problem is that once a party starts to commit atrocities, all others tend to do it. Atrocities by Israel are not new, and Israel has a long history about it, since its inception:
That is the consequence of a long-term policy. Israel made sure the Palestinian authority was sidelined and helped Hamas get full control of the Gaza Strip. History did not start in October 2023.
> was the Nova music festival massacre justified resistance
Intentionally killing civilians is never justified. But this still makes Palestine/Hamas the (much) smaller genocidal terrorist in this conflict. Free people don't need freedom fighters ;).
Now, I have no horse in this race, I am not related to any of the peoples involved, and live far away. I'm just the voice that finds genocide wrong. You on the other hand look like you're happily riding the terrorist, genocidal horse. I don't expect anything from you in terms of quality debate.
no massacre is justified, but can you remind us how and where did Hamas get helicopters and tanks and all of a sudden all cars were smashed? maybe Hannibal directive handed them over their tanks
Yea, I do wonder, why that might be? Why is a country 1500 miles away, that doesn't even share a common border, preoccupied with the destruction of Israel to the point it invested hundreds of billion of dollars in its offensive capabilities and network of proxies on every side of Israel, had a special paramilitary wing (Quds Force) for operations inside Israel, had a public clock counting down the existence of Israel and called for the destruction of Israel on each and every opportunity?
What's the obsession with the destruction of Israel? Could it be related to the fact that an Islamic Republic of (...) could not accept a Jewish rule right in the middle of the great Muslim Ummah?
Well, for starters just today they hit cental, civilian areas of Beirut with 100 attacks in just 10 minutes - killing more Lebanese civilians in ten minutes than Iran killed Israeli civilians in months of war. Absolutely vile, with clear genocidal intent, and with the aim of stealing Lebanese land.
You are ignoring the elephant in the room: Hezbollah was literally founded in 1982 under IRGC direction; 1,500 Revolutionary Guards deployed to the Bekaa Valley to organize and train it. It is arguably the most successful export of the 1979 revolution's "velayat-e faqih" ideology. So Iran colonized Lebanon.
Hezbollah formally accepts Khamenei as wali al-faqih the supreme juridical authority. That's not alliance, that's religious-political fealty to a foreign head of state.
Iran provides an estimated $700M–$1B/year, plus missiles, drones, training. Without Iran, Hezbollah's strategic arsenal doesn't exist.
It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.
You are ignoring the mammoth on the room: Hezbollah only even exists because of Israeli aggression; murder, rape, land theft, and as we saw yesterday, civilian massacres.
> So Iran colonized Lebanon
They haven't "colonised" anything, and, at best, it's disingenuous to describe training a resistance group as such.
> It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.
To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous! They are stooges, tasked with sitting back and doing nothing while Israel carries out ethnic cleansing and genocide. An MI6 front (Westminster Foundation for Democracy) even has an office inside the Lebanese parliament.
Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist.
"To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous"
Wow, this is quite a take. If Hezbollah doesn't have to respect Lebanon sovereignty
then why does Israel?
"Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist."
This is just a insane conspiracy theory. Hezbollah is the organization that actually partially took over the Lebanese government with Iranian help.
Hezbollah attacks Israel with absolutely no concern for the damage Israels counterattacks will do to Lebanon.
Israel would not be attacking Hezbollah if Hezbollah wasn't attacking Israel. Israel just wants to exist while Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all want to destroy it. Don't expect Israel to just passively accept this. Try to imagine how the US would react to a Mexican cartel shooting rockets at El Paso. I couldn't feel sorry for that cartel when the US counterattacked.
Let me ask you a few questions
1) do you think Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran can defeat Israel with force?
To me, it's just another example of what the poor and marginalized in this country have known for generations, finally catching up to the comfortable class. It's easier to count the institutions that AREN'T pay-to-play, especially those associated with the law and courts.
Know what's fun? Facing down a trained attorney as a pro se litigant in small claims court. Want to beat the 70-90% loss rate for pro se litigants in a forum that was originally designed specifically for pro se litigants? Hire a lawyer, lol.
Small claims, true to the name, is the lowest of low stakes. It's downhill from there.
It has been for decades now, they are just open and blatant now because the corruption is so deep rooted that there is little average people can do except choose to burn down the house around themselves.
This administration has taken it to a whole new level -- basically an organized crime syndicate.
The system has always been corrupt in that the rich write the rules but this is pure kleptocracy. Remember that Nixon was told by his own party that his conduct was unacceptable and they would not support him...
Nixon also got pardoned and faced no real repercussions for his actions other than leaving. Again, I very much believe we have been this corrupt for many decades, it is only the visibility of the corruption that has changed. What few actions against corruption we have seen was just good PR work, as evident by its lack of teeth in sentencing and complete lack of any enforcement or investigation against anyone with money or political power.
I think that it's wholly incorrect to argue it has not gotten worse. The government has always been corrupt, true. They have gotten far more open and brazen about it, true. But they are also far more grotesquely corrupt in outright disgusting ways, which is different. No other president has just gifted themselves billions of dollars of taxpayer money. No other president has bulldozed the whitehouse for open ended self gratification projects on the scale Trump as. No other president has openly run family-centric money laundering schemes of this magnitude, or openly accepted foreign bribes, etc etc etc.
It was always corrupt but my word, you can't say that it's the same corruption just more exposed.
When I see an early realistic painting, I'm impressed by the skilled hand of the artist. When I see an impressionist one, I'm awed by their ability to go through the whole process and to know which strokes are the best ones to achieve such a result. When I see a modern oil painting, I marvel at that someone takes that medium and does such things with it, where maybe the ease of editing the digital content would make it so much more convenient.
Then when I see old paintings with very particular pigments, certain blues or reds for instance, I enjoy thinking about the whole chain of events that got them there; the need of creativity even in getting the colors you wanted.
We do love a pretty picture, but so do we love a display of skill and hard work.
Before GenAI this value was mostly self-evident, but by now it's becoming less and less so; and what's worse, it's rife with one thing we don't love for sure - which is lies.
In Chess this has been going on for a while. Story of humans playing Chess is still entertaining - while AI making amazing moves seems to be less news worthy in my perception.
The people running the show are all building generational fallout shelters in new zealand. As seems to be the real 'whitehouse ballroom' plan too. They seem to be expecting that part.
On a macro scale, in Australia if you don't have a paid private health policy, you get slugged with additional tax come tax time. The same could happen here - "oh, you don't have social media? Well the state needs more tax from you to pay for your additional state surveillance"
Could it though? I have lived in rural areas and urban areas of the US. This speaks more to the rural areas than the urban, but only marginally--Americans like their firearms, they're suspicious of The Government, and they don't much care for the tax man. And by and large they like to be left the fuck alone. If the revenuers show up demanding too much we have a rich and storied history of mistreating them.
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.
The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.
I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live.
All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
Eh, i was being facetious, but really the point being it's kind of beyond the scope of what a terminal is for if we start plugging in full colour rendering. It is still cool.
That's ridiculous, even if you extend third-party to mean 'not bundled', with Linux depending on distro that's just everything except the kernel anyway, it's not some 'oh my god it's not bundled it doesn't just work', that's exactly the way it does work - if you want something you install it.
(And if you don't make such an extension, what, you have no third-party graphics drivers for example?)
Windows doesn’t even have a framebuffer console, so you’re not exactly comparing apples to apples here. In a Linux GUI (X or Wayland) running a modern terminal you get what you are asking for. Same as Windows except that standard Windows lacks the ability to run without a GUI.
If you remove the effort from those tasks, they will have no value.
10x the value of 0 is 0
reply