Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

Oh man...



Being called "asinine" by a pile of shit like Joe Scarborough... that must hurt, especially since he was rather known for butt-kissing Israel (he's a former GOP congressman, after all).

John Kerry was humiliated by the Israeli government, called "incompetent" in public and even "practically a friend of Hamas" off the record, despite all the things that the Obama administration has done for them.  That was a low point for all Americans - the world's only superpower treated like a bitch by a small country that many Americans can't even locate on the map.

But Joe Scarborough avenged it, folks!  Being called "asinine" (not to mention being accused of "indiscriminate killing of women and children") by that shameless sack of shit is really humiliating for any person alive.

[miscmisc]

The picture I get from the data and reports from Gaza is roughly what I had expected from the IDF.  If the word "IDF" stirs up in your mind the image of the smart, fearless bunch that won the Six Day War against the bigger Arab enemies in the classic blitzkrieg style, you are not up to date.  This is 2014, and the days of that kind of (largely) conventional warfare is over.  You should instead talk about a military force who had to leave Lebanon with the tail between the legs only 8 years ago.

They shelled quite a few residential blocks in Gaza into the Stone Age, killing mostly children and women.  And almost all of the cases seem to me to be the results of panic retaliation by the IDF, freaked out by the ambush carried out by a few RPG-carrying Hamas combatants.

No military is immune to the knee-jerk urge for hysterical panic retaliation.  That's what ambush does to troops, especially when the soldiers are not quite used to seeing their buddy burned to death or explode into pieces right in front of them.  But the IDF seems very, very susceptible to that.  The soldiers go bananas, freaking out at every small thing, and I suspect that the commanders largely condone their boys' rampage.  The IDF's assertion that they are the "most disciplined military force in the world" sounds hollow to say the least.

"But, but, but, we are at least behaving better than the US troops did in Fallujah, Iraq!", said an IDF commander.  No, he really said that.  You didn't hear that because he said that to an Israeli media outlet.  You are not supposed to know what's going on or being said in Israel, remember?

Israelis certainly know how to tick off Americans.  I guess that's what a "friend" is all about - casually insulting you and getting away with it.  But I dunno.  Fallujah was certainly one of the lowest points in the recent history of the US military.  The troops, having underestimated the enemies' capabilities, absolutely panicked, and destroyed every single thing that was moving, or even things that weren't moving at all, and the commanders also obliged by cluster-bombing the area indiscriminately (using "chemical weapons", no less).  But "Better than Fallujah!" is pretty much saying that you suck real bad.  And I'm not even sure if their claim is really valid, as the civilian casualty rate is actually higher in Gaza.

I mean, 80%+ is an unusual number.  You'd almost think that we are back to the times of the Mongol Horde, or Thirty Years' War.

This incompetence is a terrible thing not only for the innocent victims, but also for the IDF itself.  "Cool" is what you need the most in this kind of warfare, especially in this age of PR, and that's precisely what the IDF seems to lack at this moment.

[miscmisc]

Oh, and Hamas successfully killed a number of IDF soldiers using the same tactics as Hezbollah's, namely the hit-and-run mortar attacks on the IDF assembly points. Lesson not learned.

My American friends, they have wasted the money and ammos that your government has generously sent to them for the past eight years.

[miscmisc]

Why does the New York Times refer to the Gaza siege as "near-blockade"?  It IS fucking blockade by any standards.

What the fuck does that "near-" mean?

Is this a near-forum?  Is this Random Near-Rant Thread?

There is a war on truth going on in the US mainstream media, I'm telling you.

[miscmisc]

Very moving article:

Do Palestinians Really Exist?
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/31/yes-we-palestinians-are-human-beings.html

Yes, they do.  And this is the history:

[miscmisc]

Wait, did Ezra Klein, the wonder boy of the US mainstream media, just say that Israel is "surrounded on all sides by enemies"?

This ridiculous propaganda is persistent, especially among Americans. Many Americans actually believe that - Israel being this little frightened puppy surrounded by wolves "on all sides".

Let's see: more than 80% of Israel's land borders are with:

Egypt - friendly to Israel since 1978. The post-"Arab Spring" elected government, who announced "fairer stance" on Israel-Palestine, was toppled by the Sisi coup-government, an US ally and therefore friend of Israel's. Back to the status quo.

Jordan - very friendly since 1994. Many Jewish Israeli kids even go abroad via Jordan, FFS.

Yeah, they are "surrounded on all sides by enemies", all right.

Another war on truth.

[miscmisc]

OK, this is a real rant, so please skip it.

I've stayed in Israel for long enough for me to be able to say that I actually lived there, understand Hebrew better than many of the American Zionists do, dated Israeli women twice, once in the US, and once right in Israel, had a row with her father because of me not being Jewish, interviewed four Knesset members while I was there, attended local football/basketball games several times and saw those ultras in person, talked to many Palestinian citizens, played football with them, played basketball with Jewish kids, talked on the radio once, etc., etc., etc.

And those morons call my support for the end of Gaza siege and all that a "typical leftist knee-jerk reaction to what is actually a complicated issue."  And none of them has ever been to Israel, or has the most basic knowledge on the Hebrew language, or know any Israeli personally.

Just fuck off.

[miscmisc]

Another clip of a protest in Tel Aviv, from David Sheen:



A friend of mine attended this.  And remember: the people protesting the war, and the Gaza siege, they are about 5% of the population.  5%.  They are the ones who are "surrounded by enemies on all sides".  Absolutely hopeless, maybe, but they are definitely not wasting their time.  They still believe, against the odds, that they are on the right side of history, and I think it's noble.

[miscmisc]

Whoa.  The US mainstream media is calling the alleged capture of an Israeli soldier by Hamas "kidnapping".  And according to the White House, that's a "barbaric and outrageous" act.  They didn't use those words when the IDF was (and is) indiscriminately pounding on the residential blocks.

In what world is capturing an enemy soldier of an invading army considered "kidnapping" and "barbaric and outrageous", worse than shelling at civilians?

This massive assault on truth and plain common sense by the American elites is almost horrifying.  I'm someone who's used to that, but still.

Holy shit, America.  Are you out of your fucking mind?  Why does the word "Israel" drive you to such a creepy Orwellian universe?  I mean, I know why, but it's way out of order even by your already-ridiculous standards.  The old Soviet Union is laughing back right at you, and this is not even your own fucking war.

[miscmisc]

A small piece of advice to the US politicians and pundits:

Stop doing that "I'm a strong supporter of Israel, and my record shows that.  I've always supported the Jewish state 100%, but..." routine like a broken Mr. Robotto every time you try to say something remotely, sorta kinda critical of Israel.  Your Zionist political donors/bosses know that you always voted for/argued faithfully for supporting Israel, without your so slavishly reminding them.

THEY ACTUALLY DON'T LIKE THAT.  That makes you look like you are scared of something.  Your Jewish donors are not dumb.  They know that such a routine rather sows the seeds of suspicion in many viewers' mind.

Just act like normal people.  If you want to say something critical of Israel, just say it.  Just because you pulled that "Don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest Israel supporter in the world" routine doesn't mean they will accept your criticism.  Your groveling makes no difference.

Let me repeat: YOUR DONORS/BOSSES DO NOT LIKE THAT.

Thx.

[gols]

Aug 1, 2014 9:09:50 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

OK, this is a real rant, so please skip it.

I've stayed in Israel for long enough for me to be able to say that I actually lived there, understand Hebrew better than many of the American Zionists do, dated Israeli women twice, once in the US, and once right in Israel, had a row with her father because of me not being Jewish, interviewed four Knesset members while I was there, attended local football/basketball games several times and saw those ultras in person, talked to many Palestinian citizens, played football with them, played basketball with Jewish kids, talked on the radio once, etc., etc., etc.

I can't skip this - who the hell are you?!

They had a little piece on the news yesterday. Two civilian 'mothers', one from Gaza, one from Israel (Jerusalem), describing how their lives had been affected by the conflict. The Palestinian described how she was giving extra chocolates etc to her kids because she really didn't know if every night would be their last one. The Israeli's response was "That is exactly how I feel! A rocket recently landed in our neighbourhood! That is to say... it was about two kilometres away...". I nearly threw something at the TV.

[miscmisc]

It was purely accidental that I had to stay there for so long, as I'm not involved in any Israeli or Jewish or Palestinian or Human Rights organization. I was supposed to stay there for one week, but ended up being pretty much stuck there for months. I decided to make the most of it, and extended my stay even further. I've been accused a couple of times of being a foreign agent of Mossad, Freemason, etc. by antisemitic types due to my "suspiciously long stay" in Israel, lol.

Anyway, I have to say this at this point: if you (not meaning any specific "you") still think this is about Israel's "self-defense", and that this is about "terrorism", you will never get it. You've probably already made up your mind for whatever reason. There is probably no point in trying to convince you. It's futile, and I won't even try.  I will rant on, though.

[miscmisc]

Adam Curtis talks about how static our pop culture has been for a long time:

All culture always goes back and feeds off the past, it can't help it, but there are two ways of doing it. Either you can go back and get inspiration from the past and create something genuinely new, which is the whole history of all sorts of things – not just art and music. What bothers me at the moment is that you get a very different sense out of pop culture, which is that it is literally like a form of archaeology...

...Yes, it’s an incredibly static time. Why do you think we’ve got so many zombie movies? It's quite obvious – it's so obvious when you know it – it's because the dead won't go away. We are surrounded by the dead. Okay, The Stone Roses are touring live, but it’s a dead album. There’s a lot of music – like Kurt Cobain and all these people – they’re dead. The Rolling Stones; the music is dead, but it won’t go away. It's constantly replayed to us, and it is like zombie culture. So many things just go back and dig up the bloody grave...

...Art is stuck in the past, just like music is stuck in the past, and journalism is stuck in the past.

Old People always bitch about the present, like how shitty music has become, how shitty everything has become, "Oh, back in our days..." etc.  But what he's talking about is something different.  It's not that it's "shitty", but that it's stuck.  I've talked about it in this thread before - how hopelessly music has been "stuck", how horribly art has stagnated.  People talk about "bad music" from the '80s/'90s, but the problem is that we can't even call our contemporary culture "bad".  It's a zombie.

This horrible stagnation started around 2003.  Absolutely nothing even remotely interesting has happened in the world of art/music/films over the last decade.  I don't even care about movies nowadays.  Hell, I WANT bad music.  Where is OUR bad music?  Everything sounds like a Hi-Definition rework of a track from 1999.  Everything sounds like a "digitally remastered" Beach Boys Best-Hit album.  They sound so neat, and so fucking boring.  I feel sorry for kids today.  The most vacuous/reactionary ones of the "artists" from (roughly) my generation, like Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola for example, have become the media darlings, working hard to keep our culture in the state of stagnation as we speak.  That kind of people dominate the culture so thoroughly that the relentlessly high productivity of genuinely interesting people like Coen Brothers can't make up for it.  I don't think it's pure coincidence that the idea of digital utopia and "organic" horizontalism based on the potential of online communications started exploding among the masses around the same time.

And on the political/social front, Curtis has this to say about the Occupy movement:

The Occupy movement absolutely astonished me. They had a brilliant slogan the 99 and 1 per cent – that was the first time I thought someone’s got it, but then they completely blew it. I went to their meetings and they have been completely captivated by this pseudo-managerial theory of a new kind of democracy where there are no leaders and everyone sits around gesticulating if they disagree. It was one of the most absurd ideas in modern politics.

If you are dealing with questions of power you have to understand power, and you can't pretend it doesn’t exist, either on your side or their side. The point about managerialism is it pretends power doesn't exist; it’s a way of keeping you in your place. For them to buy into that was the most cosmically stupid ideas I have ever heard in my life. If you want to change the world you have to deal with questions of power: the power of the ones who don't want you to change it, and the power of those assembled on your side who do want to change it. Humans are humans, and power is a really complicated thing and you can't ignore it and by ignoring it they let everything go, so now there is a vacuum, an absolute vacuum. We have alternative comedians telling us everything is shit … well that’s nothing! I know that.

I couldn't agree more.  The popularity of horizontalism, the kind of creepy Silicon Valley type liberatarianism that makes you believe that you can somehow build a compassionate society organically through the "horizontal" connections between people instead of a clear organizational structure, is nothing but the sign of the decline of civilization.  All it does is keep you blind to the fact that Google, for example, is an almost classical POWER, no different from (or even worse than) IBM and Co. in the past, and definitely not a benign "platform" (God, I hate this word) where you can "organically" build a utopian society together.  That delusion is revolting, but so many techie/digital revolution types keep falling for it.

[miscmisc]

NO, CRITICIZING ISRAEL IS NOT ANTI-SEMITISM

[miscmisc]

There is something rather important that has been rarely mentioned in the coverage of Israel-Palestine - what's going on in Israel's (and Gaza's) big neighbor, Egypt.

If you visited Egypt, from the US, and turned on TV now, you would probably think for a moment that your flight took a wrong route and ended up sending you back to the US, and that the Pyramids that you think you saw were actually a movie set in New Mexico. 

What I'm talking about is their coverage of the war.  The loudest voice over there on the mainstream TV, which caters mostly to the secular middle/upper-middle class and pro-military/pro-status-quo people, is that it's all Hamas's fault, and that all Israel is doing is "self-defense".  Basically the US mainstream view, but they are even more passionate than the Americans in demonizing Hamas.

You need to know the recent history of Egypt in order to understand why.

Remember the "Arab Spring" a few years ago?  "Tahrir Square"?  Those massive protests/political movements forced Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for a long time, to step down.  There was an election after that, which Muslim Brotherhood (MB) won.  They are an Islamist political party supported mostly by the working class and poor people.  Which means that it was a "wrong" result for the secular upper-middle class, the have's/capitalist class in the Egyptian society, and their supporters abroad (including the US, and of course, Israel).  What's "worse" for them, they started challenging the military, Mubarak's political base, which controlled so much - way too much - not only of Egypt's politics, but also of its economy.  Mubarak was gone, but most of the military apparatchiks managed to stay.  And they saw the imminent danger of their influence greatly reduced by the new government.

So, they staged a coup, and it was successful.  The iPhone-loving upper-middle class types had a collective sigh of relief.  Most of the politicians and elites abroad, who had applauded the "Arab Spring" as the triumph of democracy and all that, looked the other way.  Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a (corrupt) military establishment guy, became the new president, ousted MB, and started jailing MB members left and right, executing many of them.

This is a very simplified summary, but that's about where we are now.  Sisi is basically Mubarak 2.0, with an even bigger reason to demonize Muslim Brotherhood.  And from the establishment's point of view, Hamas and MB are one and the same.  Mubarak always looked the other way when Israel committed crimes against Palestinians, and you should certainly expect the same - or even worse - from Sisi.

If it hadn't been for Sisi and Co.'s coup and their tacit consent, Israel wouldn't have dared to launch Operation Protective Edge.  That's how important Egypt always is when it comes to Palestine.

Palestinians are used to it, though; they know their "fellow" Arabs are the ones whom they should trust/rely on the least in the world.