ARMs Race

We had a good five or ten minutes somewhere in 1945. Also, gotta admit that Moon Landing was cool.

Everything else I could probably live without.

We need a strong USA.

Glances at the last 40 years of US history

Do we?

Hamas Says

Always telling when they refuse to point to the leadership they are ostensibly dealing with in between rounds of mass extermination.

Netanyahu has made it a national policy of targeting all former members of the Palestinian government, both in Gaza and the West Bank. His IDF kills militants and diplomats alike. They find family members and murder them, too. They gun down whole neighborhoods on the suspicion a Hamas insurgent might be inside. They fill their prisons with suspects and torture Gazans to death, extracting a few confessions out along the way. Then they kick off wars with neighboring Lebanon and Syria, they bomb their ostensible allies in Jordan and Egypt, and they even send bombers deep into Iran.

Hell, they are shooting their own Oct 7th hostages. Who is left to sign a “surrender” agreement on these terms? Anyone waving a white flag is bombed into the pavement.

Might as well ask for Anne Frank’s surrender as anyone in Gaza.

Mamdani’s Jihadist plan to open municipally run grocery stores will destroy NYC with Shari Onions.

Israel does not have a future after this.

If Germany and Japan could have a future after WW2 - a war they lost categorically - Israel will do just fine in the coming decades, after successfully executing a full ethnic cleanse of some of the more valuable real estate in the Mediterranean.

Israel isn’t a rogue state, it’s a cat’s paw. They’re doing the dirty work as a proxy for allies who have wanted to wipe Arabs off that corner of the map for decades. In the end, however, you’re going to see western states welcome Israelis back into the fold with open arms, just so long as they can pin this all on Netanyahu and pretend it wasn’t a national project with the full support of the Israeli public.

I would say the big distinction between Ukraine and Gaza is that in Ukraine there has been a meaningful (and enormously lucrative) project to arm locals in opposition to Russian invasion. It’s been of dubious success, given how much territory they still lost. But its difficult to say that the Biden Era government (or even Trump Term 1) wasn’t willing to shovel arms and mercenaries into Ukraine in an effort to cripple Russian advances.

In Gaza, the Israel blockade has gone virtually unchecked - outside of a few salvos from Yemen and some allegations of support from Iran and Hezbollah. Americans are supporting the genociders not the victims. There is no Gaza military left to repeal an invasion nor is there any appetite for a Hamas resistance to repeal IDF advances. At this point, it’s little more than a shooting gallery.

There’s a line of combat between Ukraine and Russia. There’s nothing in Gaza. Just Israelis and their private security contractors kettling and massacring neighborhood after neighborhood, then flagging bulldozers to knock down the houses when they’re done.

British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren’t carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.

Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.

Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there’s no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.

Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.

But this idea that we’ve had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels “policing” the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you’ve got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.

Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.

Trump: “I’m doing things my own way.”

CIA Section Chief: “Show him that Zapruder film again and make sure he doesn’t forget about it this time.”

The British Government considers being Arab as synonymous with being a terrorist. Not, incidentally, any differently than how Israelis see them.

Of course, the Brits were a colonial power that spent centuries quelling domestic revolts in order to extract natural resources and exploiting cheap labor. Also, not that different from their Israeli peers.

Step 1: Go to an Ivy League school

Step 2: Make friends with a failson/daughter of a prevailing plutocrat

Step 3: Put the Matrix-code screensaver on your laptop (apparently, this worked on Elon Musk in the early Twitter takeover days)

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Get a $10M Series A and a $100M Series B thanks to the family of your rich friends buying into your hair-brained Theranos knock-off.

From my perspective Ukrainian strikes are carried out in self defense

And that’s the problem. Any amount of bloodletting is permissible if you stick “I think they’re defending themselves” in front of it.

So long as you’re aligned with the US of course.

I’ve heard Americans say the same about Middle Eastern casualties weighed against Israelis.

Certain people’s lives simply don’t matter.

the oil industry.

I guess it’s cool to kill civilians when they’re roughnecks?

It’s not that I didn’t know any of these

Strange that you would pretend ignorance up front

Can you elaborate on Ukrainian salvos please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_in_Russia_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

And also - on Russian peace proposals too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

It’s been open war for the last three years. Idk if you can blame the latest salvo on Russians being extra mean during Constitution Day any more than you can blame the next Ukrainian salvo on Russians deserving a double-plus bombing on Lenin’s birthday or whenever.

Every proposal for a peace plan gets flattened with a media barrage of “They’re inhuman monsters who are incapable of peace and all deserve to be exterminated!” So until the two countries can get past that (or one/both finally collapse - which I’ve been told will happen very shortly, continuously for the last three years) we’re going to continue to see new records set in the number of atrocities committed into the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, that’s not how Imperial Presidencies work.

Mike Lee floats a lot of turds, even in excess of what the standard put out. He’s been agitating against NATO membership practically since his first day in the Senate, along with his close friend Rand Paul.

This bill won’t even make it out of committee, unless Lee can get a bug in Trump’s ear over it.

Easy to forget that Italy was with the Allies group in WW1. But also that WW1 ended with private sector creditors knocking at the door of winners and losers alike. The old aristocracy had leveraged itself to the hilt in order to finance a pointless, needless, catastrophic war between regional powers. And now the new aristocracy of capital was trying to strip the copper out of the walls of the proles in order to pay back what was owed.

This lead to a groundswell of socialist organization and radicalism in the wake of the Great War. One which threatened aristocrats old and new. The only response Italians (and Germans… and Brits and Americans to boot) could conceive of was a fascist heel-stomp on the necks of the rising organizations of labor.

TRAITORS OF THE WORLD!

Hardly traitors. Fascism was pioneered to preserve the aristocracy and the capitalists alike, by turning worker against worker along ethnic and national lines.

It was the socialists who were the traitors. They sought to end the old world and bring about a new one. And they nearly did it.