All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[4saken1]

Oddly that is not how it worked out for Germans who saw their parents killed by allied bombing. Maybe the difference is that fascism is not a religion with promise of a better life in the next world.

Good point. There will always be religious extremists who use that as a rational to attack Israel. It is hard to navigate that line between defending oneself and violating the rights of those that are largely indistinguishable from those attacking you. Israel has done a **** job of this, which is exacerbating the very situation that they are trying to defend themselves from.

WRT whether or not Palestinian children will end up differently than German kids post WWII, that depends on a few factors. Despite the horrific attack of Oct 7, it wouldn't be that much of a reach for Palestinian children to understand that it was in no small part in retaliation for the way Israel has treated Palestinians for 50+ years. The human rights violations that Israel has committed since the occupation began will also help to radicalize them. The final straw will be when Israel changes absolutely nothing after the occupation (assuming their goal to eliminate Hamas is ever met to their satisfaction), except to maybe to tighten their grip more on the Palestinian people. It is easy to convert people to the promise of a better life when this one is ****! When you can point to the reason it is thus, it makes it that much easier.

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

[comictimes]

I keep thinking about how Al Jazeera cut away from the old Palestinian man at a Gaza hospital when he started cursing out Hamas for hiding in hospitals and putting them all at risk. It seems there is a diversity of views there that doesn't always make it to media reporting.

Link to the video?

[Catlady in training]

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

Which past war do you mean? In most past wars, nobody gave a .... about civilians and they were the ones who suffered the most in every war. The difference is that now there are weapons that are capable of much bigger damage than in the past.

[hyped78]

Link to the video?

https://twitter.com/AimenDean/status...ng-the-sick%2F

There have been several cases like this one.

[hyped78]

Which past war do you mean? In most past wars, nobody gave a .... about civilians and they were the ones who suffered the most in every war. The difference is that now there are weapons that are capable of much bigger damage than in the past.

Agreed. Plus Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world.

And now it's much easier to accurately report on civilian casualties than it was, say, 50 years ago.

[Catlady in training]

Which past war do you mean? In most past wars, nobody gave a .... about civilians and they were the ones who suffered the most in every war. The difference is that now there are weapons that are capable of much bigger damage than in the past.

That's not to say that the situation now isn't horrible, but at the least now we have more of an idea what is happening. And people call it out, for all the good it does.
Imagine for example the Crusades with current weapons ... .

[AnakinFlair]

He also wants to take away women's right to vote.

Yeah, I saw that about 20 minutes after I posted. And I'm sure there is more besides what I listed as well.

[Gray Lensman]

I grew up listening to British Forces radio, which is where I learned much of my English.

Coalition troops in the country aren't exactly an occupying force. American soldiers in France can get in trouble with French authorities - I have a cousin who was in the Navy, and one time when his carrier was in France he was assigned to see who showed up and didn't just before the carrier sailed - he was there with the Captain, and the last to show up were three drunken Marines who "borrowed" a car because, as they claimed, "the keys were in the ignition.". It was a police car, and a couple of minutes later several more of them showed up looking for the missing vehicle. Those three Marines got to have an extended stay in France, albeit one with less of a view than they would have liked.

Occupying forces, however, enforce their laws upon the population, rather than being subject to them. I admit the Cold War had to suck, playing host to soldiers who didn't know, or sometimes even care about the rules and culture of the host country, and were needed because they kept away something worse. A true occupying army that wanted to roll in and liberate everyone their from their own elected government and forcefeed the "joys" of communism on the unwilling masses.

[Tami]

Spate of Mock News Sites With Russian Ties Pop Up in U.S.

Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.

In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.

Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed furtive Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools had “made this even easier to do and to make the content that they do even more targeted.”

The researchers at Clemson disclosed the Russian connections behind the D.C. Weekly website in a report in December. After their disclosure, Russian narratives began appearing on another site that had been created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.

The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose name clearly is meant to evoke the city’s storied Daily News tabloid, were both created on Jan. 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which monitors domains.

The site claims to have a staff of 17 journalists, but they seem to have been fabricated. The biography of that story’s author, called Jessica Devlin, used as a profile picture a photograph of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Ms. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or the author until fact checkers reached out to her.

Other articles that appear on the sites appear to have been lifted from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from Russian state media’s English-language news agencies, like RT. Some stories have carelessly included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Mr. Linvill and Mr. Warren wrote in the study.

A word of warning. Don't be fooled.

[CaptainEurope]

Link to the video?

https://x.com/warmweatheronly/status...844927513?s=20

[CaptainEurope]

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

Wait what


.......

[kidfresh512]

U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea

President Biden will announce in his State of the Union on Thursday that he is ordering the U.S. military to build a floating pier off Gaza, in what the White House called an “emergency mission” that would allow hundreds of truckloads of additional aid to be delivered by sea to Gazans who are on the brink of starvation.

The project will take several weeks, involving hundreds or thousands of U.S. troops on ships just off shore, in keeping with Mr. Biden’s mandate that no American soldiers be on the ground inside Gaza as the conflict rages. Briefing reporters, administration officials said that the port would be constructed in cooperation with other countries in the region, but it was unclear whether Israel would be joining the effort.

___________________________
What Sweden brings to NATO

Sweden is joining NATO, and it's not coming empty-handed.

Sweden's membership is a huge geopolitical boost for NATO. Alliance members now encircle the Baltic Sea (with the exception of the narrow entry to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad). As well as making life difficult for Russia's Baltic Sea Fleet, it also gives the alliance the ability to monitor critical pipelines and cables beneath the surface.

Sweden is also a pocket military power. Despite a population of only 10 million, and last year spending only 1.54 percent of its GDP on defense, the country's centuries of neutrality have forced it to develop a world-class military-industrial complex.

[PaulBullion]

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

The people who died in Coventry, Hiroshima and Dresden would have words with thee.

[Farealmer]

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

More like in past wars there wasn't 24 hour news cycles and social media.

[Kirby101]

Also, in past wars greater effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.

No they didn't. Not the Blitz on London, not the fire bombing of Tokyo or Dresden, not in Stalingrad, not Hanoi....