All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tendrin]

Just for clarification, the Reuters poll mention Hamas but asked about Palestinians. It’s potentially biasing, but they also only asked about Israel targeting civilians and not the reverse.The question was should the US … support the Israelis position (41% yes), the Palestinians position (2% yes). In the same poll, people didn’t want civilians to be killed. And younger people wanted the US to be a neutral mediator, but still did not think the US should support the Palestinians position.

Edited to just put the question in.

Thank you! And yeah, I don't think I'd ever argue that support for Israel doesn't run deep in the USA, and that's before we get to anything else.

[shooshoomanjoe]

You know, it seems to me that if you don't want to be blockaded in your territory by your more powerful neighbor, you probably should stop constantly trying to murder them. Maybe that's just me. I do wonder how it's possible to occupy a place without actually being there, but whatever.

It's in reference to the Palestinian land Israel steals from Palestinians for Israeli settlers.

[Vakanai]

I heard a story that the lunatic who murdered that poor little kid was addicted to watching Faux News according to his wife. Can't say that surprises me even a little bit.

Of course it didn't surprise you - the surprise would have been if he didn't watch a lot of that shitty network pretending to be news all the damn time. The base assumption when any story like this breaks is that they watch that crap, because they always do. It's a brainwashing ultra right wing conservative propaganda machine that makes viewers into paranoid, scared, angry bigots, hence why a disproportionately high number of hate crimes are carried out by viewers of Fox News. Frankly it deserves to be considered as a terrorist organization and recognized as the legitimate threat to democracy it has become.

[BeastieRunner]

My parents are on TV #3 with the fox news logo burned into it.

"We hardly watch TV anymore!"

Sigh ...

[hyped78]

It's in reference to the Palestinian land Israel steals from Palestinians for Israeli settlers.

If Gaza and the West Bank are today within Israel it's because Israel were attacked - more than once - by all its neighbors. It's also because the Arabs initially rejected the two-state solution and immediately attacked Israel.

The claim to that land is the same for the "Israelis" and the "Palestinians", both have a claim to it. But wars made the territory become a part of Israel.

[Catlady in training]

Wired - The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation
People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen.

https://www.wired.com/story/x-israel...t-newtab-en-gb

This is a preview of how much disinformation X is gonna have during the US 2024 Election.

Is it too naive to hope that people stop taking their news from Xitter until then? I guess it is. Sigh.

So Ilhan Omar of the Squad got caught promoting misinformation about the Israel/Gaza situation. She was caught retweeting a picture of dead children and captioning it "Child genocide in Palestine".

It was a 2013 photo of children killed in Syria in a sarin gas attack, killed obviously by the Assad regime.

After criticism, she's taken down her retweet. AFAIK to date she hasn't apologized.

I would give her the benefit of the doubt first that she might not have known it's fake. As mentioned, there is a lot of misinformation out there and people want to post any new info very quickly without checking sources. I know I have sometimes seen something that I wanted to post here but had trouble finding any official site that reported it.

I was just thinking about this this morning- was there a lot of outrage when the Allies carpet-bombed cities in Germany during WWII? There were millions of civilian casualties, and I can't remember anybody raising any concerns over there. And yes, the Nazis are horrible and I have no problem with us killing them in the war, but there were also women and children (and men) who had nothing to do with the decisions the Nazi's made, and may have not even know the extent of what they were doing, that were killed when our B-17's dropped thousands of pounds explosives on targets that were aimed by little more than a down-looking scope and a prayer.

I hate seeing that Palestinian children have been killed. And frankly, I know Hamas loves this because the terror Israel's retaliation is causing will just drive more of the surviving young to their cause. And I would love if somehow they could evacuate the women and children to a safe zone. But when you got an enemy that likes to blend in with the civilian population and use them as shields, I just don't know how you stage an offensive where civilians AREN'T killed. And I wish people would think about that, especially the idiots on college campuses.

I have seen a comment recently saying that if WW2 was fought today with the current population and the opinions that are prevalent now and the internet and access to the news, we would have lost because people would be protesting any military actions. This was in reference to the fight against terrorism, but I have seen comments like that also last year about the war in Ukraine. I keep thinking about it and I am not sure whether to agree or not. The current pacifism of many people in the West is IMO too influenced by the long period of relative peace that we had so it's hard to predict how the same people would react if the war was here and now. I know that I have reevaluated a lot of my opinions in the last year and half, I was much more of a pacifist before but some of the most grisly details of the war forced me to change that. I think many of us have thought that we (the humans in general) have evolved past the most primitive urges and are no longer capable of the worst cruelties we have committed in the past. (I mean on large scale, of course the will always be rapes and murders, but it's different if it's few individuals and if it's done systematically.) It's a shock to see that that is not true and many of us have a hard time to accept all of that and adapt to it, without going too far in the other direction and loose too much of our faith in humanity.

Still, apart from all the people protesting, when we look at the leaders of the US and other democratic countries (who I have no doubt have more information that us about what is at stake), we can see a clear support of Israel and strong condemnation of the terrorist attacks and this makes me think that they would keep a pragmatic approach in the war like the leaders in the past and when necessary do what needs to be done even if it was unpopular with general public. Before WW2 there was also a lot of appeasement towards Hitler that later turned out to be a mistake so it's not like leaders back then did everything right.

Make no mistake, I hate war and hate the idea of any civilian casualties and I would like nothing more than if all the people who like to engage in violence, whether it's terrorists inspired by religion, terrorists inspired by right-wing white nationalism, groups like Wagner, or any individuals who like to rape, torture and kill people would just **** off to some other planet and fight there against each other and leave the rest of us in peace. But since that seems to be impossible now, I don't have any answer how to balance empathy and compassion with pragmatism when facing an evil that has no compassion for us. I certainly don't envy any of our leaders and I'm glad that I don't have to make those decisions. I hope eventually we will get to a better place, even though evil and hatred will probably never fully go away because it's connected to humankind. Maybe it's a relief that at some point, we will probably destroy ourselves and hopefully we won't take the whole planet with us.

It's official, PiS lost in Poland.

Hooray!

[achilles]

Is it too naive to hope that people stop taking their news from Xitter until then? I guess it is. Sigh.




I would give her the benefit of the doubt first that she might not have known it's fake. As mentioned, there is a lot of misinformation out there and people want to post any new info very quickly without checking sources. I know I have sometimes seen something that I wanted to post here but had trouble finding any official site that reported it.




I have seen a comment recently saying that if WW2 was fought today with the current population and the opinions that are prevalent now and the internet and access to the news, we would have lost because people would be protesting any military actions. This was in reference to the fight against terrorism, but I have seen comments like that also last year about the war in Ukraine. I keep thinking about it and I am not sure whether to agree or not. The current pacifism of many people in the West is IMO too influenced by the long period of relative peace that we had so it's hard to predict how the same people would react if the war was here and now. I know that I have reevaluated a lot of my opinions in the last year and half, I was much more of a pacifist before but some of the most grisly details of the war forced me to change that. I think many of us have thought that we (the humans in general) have evolved past the most primitive urges and are no longer capable of the worst cruelties we have committed in the past. (I mean on large scale, of course the will always be rapes and murders, but it's different if it's few individuals and if it's done systematically.) It's a shock to see that that is not true and many of us have a hard time to accept all of that and adapt to it, without going too far in the other direction and loose too much of our faith in humanity.

Still, apart from all the people protesting, when we look at the leaders of the US and other democratic countries (who I have no doubt have more information that us about what is at stake), we can see a clear support of Israel and strong condemnation of the terrorist attacks and this makes me think that they would keep a pragmatic approach in the war like the leaders in the past and when necessary do what needs to be done even if it was unpopular with general public. Before WW2 there was also a lot of appeasement towards Hitler that later turned out to be a mistake so it's not like leaders back then did everything right.

Make no mistake, I hate war and hate the idea of any civilian casualties and I would like nothing more than if all the people who like to engage in violence, whether it's terrorists inspired by religion, terrorists inspired by right-wing white nationalism, groups like Wagner, or any individuals who like to rape, torture and kill people would just **** off to some other planet and fight there against each other and leave the rest of us in peace. But since that seems to be impossible now, I don't have any answer how to balance empathy and compassion with pragmatism when facing an evil that has no compassion for us. I certainly don't envy any of our leaders and I'm glad that I don't have to make those decisions. I hope eventually we will get to a better place, even though evil and hatred will probably never fully go away because it's connected to humankind. Maybe it's a relief that at some point, we will probably destroy ourselves and hopefully we won't take the whole planet with us.



Hooray!

I wouldn't give Omar the benefit of the doubt; she's a notorious anti-Semite and pro-terrorist. That's ignoring her extreme corruption. She's never missed an opportunity to even get Democrats to consider condemning her actions.

[Catlady in training]

Boebert spent campaign cash at Beetlejuice boyfriend’s bar

The Colorado congresswoman dropped a few hundred bucks at Hooch, a place that hosts drag shows.

Well before Rep. Lauren Boebert and her date got thrown out of a local theater showing of Beetlejuice for being disruptive and frisky, her campaign spent hundreds of dollars at his bar.

The Colorado congresswoman’s campaign put down $317.48 in late July at Hooch Craft Cocktail Bar in Aspen, Co., according to her most recent campaign finance filings. That’s the same bar co-owned by Quinn Gallagher, the man who accompanied Boebert to the theater that fateful September night.

“Meeting with donors and covering their food and beverage costs at a popular local establishment of their choosing is a standard campaign procedure,” said Boebert’s campaign manager, Drew Sexton.

The campaign expenditure at Hooch was listed as being for “event catering.” Boebert says she and Gallagher are no longer dating because he is a Democrat.

Do you think psychologists will eventually classify a new type of syndrome and name it after Republicans?

[Malvolio]

I wouldn't give Omar the benefit of the doubt; she's a notorious anti-Semite and pro-terrorist. That's ignoring her extreme corruption. She's never missed an opportunity to even get Democrats to consider condemning her actions.

Omar is not an anti-semite. She has made anti-Israeli remarks. That does not make her antisemitic.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Omar is not an anti-semite. She has made anti-Israeli remarks. That does not make her antisemitic.

I wonder if this view grew after Israel stupidly claimed supporting Palestinians is anti-Semitic.

[thwhtGuardian]

I wonder if this view grew after Israel stupidly claimed supporting Palestinians is anti-Semitic.

That's giving people who say it too much credit, they say she's anti-semitic because it seems like an easy gotcha.

[achilles]

Omar is not an anti-semite. She has made anti-Israeli remarks. That does not make her antisemitic.

She absolutely is an anti-Semite. She's made many comments about Jews with all the horrible stereotypes. There's no denying it. She's not the only member of The Squad that is anti-Semitic, either.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/11/polit...ash/index.html

As the article suggest, she frequently uses anti-Semtic tropes. And this is the Democrats berating her for the most part.

Per Vox:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...-semitism-jews

There are dozens of other articles from very different sorts of news organizations, all saying the same thing, she's very anti-Semetic in her attacks on Israel, using all the tropes she can, and then denying she knew what they meant.

I wonder why you guys are defending her so much...

Sure you want to?

[AnakinFlair]

They are voting for Speaker now, and if all the Democrats stick together, it looks like Jordan will be short on votes.

[Tami]

If those who are voting for McCarthy and Scalise voted for Jefferies, he'd win the vote.

Jefferies is now 5 votes short of winning.

jordan is 17 votes short.

[achilles]

That's giving people who say it too much credit, they say she's anti-semitic because it seems like an easy gotcha.

Also because she is. Plenty of Democrats have noticed this and objected, as well as mostly all the Jewish organizations.