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Post by Jofeljoh! on Jul 15, 2014 17:40:59 GMT 1
Reading your post I couldn't help but thinking of a Christopher Hitchens quote from is autobiography: What do you think of Douglas Murray's view on Gaza? www.gspellchecker.com/2014/07/ep24-douglas-murray/(begins at the 39 minutes mark) He just says: "I think that Israel should be allowed to win". Apparently the only way the thinks this can be resolved is to let them fight it out and one side should win this war. |
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Post by h on Jul 15, 2014 19:35:13 GMT 1
Someone attempted to edit the Wikipedia entry for "Crimea" to assert a more "Western" view. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616961289&oldid=616860312From: To: It was done by Mr./Ms. 143.231.249.141. And according to Dr. Whois: NetRange: 143.231.0.0 - 143.231.255.255 CIDR: 143.231.0.0/16 OriginAS: NetName: HOUSE2 NetHandle: NET-143-231-0-0-1 Parent: NET-143-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Assignment RegDate: 1990-10-17 Updated: 2010-05-25 Ref: whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-143-231-0-0-1OrgName: U.S. House of RepresentativesOrgId: ISUHR Address: 2nd and D St SW City: Washington StateProv: DC PostalCode: 20515 Country: US And his/her edit history suggests that he/she is a hard worker. pwned |
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Post by Jofeljoh! on Jul 15, 2014 19:54:46 GMT 1
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 16, 2014 2:00:05 GMT 1
He just says: "I think that Israel should be allowed to win". Apparently the only way the thinks this can be resolved is to let them fight it out and one side should win this war. He must define "win". "Win" what exactly? The original goal of the Zionist project was to have a Jewish state, which presupposes that at least the overwhelming majority of the population must be Jewish. More than 20% of the Israeli citizens are Palestinians, who are either Muslim or Christian and certainly not Jewish. That's already way too many from the Zionist point of view. Does he mean that the international community should just let them carry on ethnic cleansing and don't make a beep about it? And most importantly, if we allow that to happen, the legitimacy of the international community would get reduced to zero. We condemned ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, but suddenly it's A-OK in Palestine? Why? Because it's "complicated"? "But, but, it's complicated" has been used as an excuse by the apologists far too often. The only "complicated" thing is the Jewish Israelis' psychology. "Complicated" is only happening inside the delicate Zionist head and nowhere else. Heck, Bosnia and Kosovo were more "complicated" if you ask me. This is a very simple issue, but that's inconvenient for a certain group of people. The two-state solution is dead, because Israel doesn't want it, never wanted it. The Israelis will never, ever allow a real sovereign Palestinian state to be founded, and will try to sabotage it with all they've got. It has become a convenient excuse for Israel to actually stall the peace process. No one should be fooled any more by Israel's pretense for the two-state solution. It's a sham. The only option left is actually a one-state solution - Jews and Arabs living as truly equal citizens, giving citizenship to the citizenship-less Arabs who were expelled from Israel decades ago and are now under the de facto Israeli control. The Israelis going the South African way. Just because you don't think that's "realistic" doesn't mean you can just go primitive like "letting them fight it out". It's childish to propose such a thing. Far too many of so-called "realists" are in actuality just irresponsible, incontinent, immature morons. And here's the bottom line: Israel can't "win", unless they are determined enough to go old-fashioned and be ready to even go so far as to push the nuke button if necessary. And they aren't, and won't be. It's utterly foolish to assume that Israel would "win". People like him are too ignorant to get it. This is not a "war" like Gettysburg or Midway or even Stalingrad. In this kind of a slow-moving, asymmetric, demographic "war", the one who can endure (and breed) the most has the ultimate advantage. Israel, clearly too spoiled to endure even a fraction of what the Palestinians have had to suffer, can only "win" by: 1) wiping out their enemies and potential ones altogether; or 2) winning their hearts over. The fact of the matter is that Israel don't have the stomach gross enough to do the former, meaning killing hundreds of thousands of civilians without flinching, and as for the latter... well, should I even say anything? War is not really about winning the battles/conflicts with the superior technology/hardware. See Iraq. In case it's still unclear to some, the US didn't "win" that one. They lost it, plain and simple. They failed to achieve any of their political goals and instead lost much ground in the geopolitical power struggle, with China and Iran (and American defense contractors, of course) being the clear winners. You may have 85% possession, 48 shots on target, but if you don't score a goal, you don't win the game. War is about scoring political goals. One of Israel's goals may be to decimate Hamas, but their final goal should be to be recognized as a normal, respectable Jewish state by the international community, and not as a pariah state. They could "solve" one problem by annihilating the Palestinians, but that would render it impossible to achieve their final goal. So, winning this "war" is almost doubly impossible. Israel's recent pointless aggressions like Operation Cast Lede and the latest Gaza bombing are the clear evidence that they are lost. The outcome won't change the basic structure in any way. All it does is drive the Palestinians even madder and more determined, and you hear the sound of yet another bridge burned down. There is no end game as long as they rely on military might - again, unless they are willing to wipe out the Palestinians. But they aren't. That option is off the table even if they are "allowed to" do that. The overwhelming majority of the Israelis are at least too sane to do such a thing. They could've actually won it - by which I mean peace and respect - ten moves back, but it's too late now. They failed to make the necessary concessions when they absolutely should have. I know it's counter-intuitive to regard Israel as the loser, seeing them kill hundreds of Palestinians so freely, and those ethically bankrupt Jewish kids on the hilltops enjoying the scene of Gaza being bombed into the Middle Age with a cup of cappuccino in their hand and all smiling. But it's true. The Palestinians may not be exactly winning it either, but Israel certainly isn't. No way, from the historical point of view. Those horrible kids on the hilltop have no idea what's going to hit them in the future. It certainly ain't going to be anything as simple as missiles. In short, they've lost it already. You can't "allow" them to "win" what they have already lost. |
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 16, 2014 5:01:38 GMT 1
And this kind of discussions have been going on for decades inside Israel. My opinions and arguments aren't anything new to most Israelis, whether or not they agree with me. The problem is that it has become much harder to voice this kind of concerns as the Israeli society has shifted rightward.
It's mostly the apologists and blind supporters outside that cling to the crudest explanations and "solutions", always helping destroy the prospect for peace. It's almost as if they don't really care about the Israelis who have to actually live there. The tragedy is that in a way, Israel has become those hardline Jewish American/European billionaires' and their minions' personal pride issue, to the exclusion of the future of the actual Jewish people who actually have to continue to live there with nowhere else to go.
As long as Israel relies so much on the irresponsible Jewish assholes like Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson, two of the biggest Republican donors in the US, there is no hope.
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 16, 2014 17:33:15 GMT 1
In North Augusta, South Carolina, a mother was jailed because she let her nine-year-old daughter play in the park unsupervised. Wow. Hours at a time! At a park, which apparently is so popular that there are about 40 kids playing at any given time, in the summer! Sounds like a perfect reason to throw the mother in jail, and place the girl in state custody! Horribleness! ... is the world going crazy or what. The mother works at McDonald's. Normally she took her daughter to the work place, and let her play with her laptop there. But unfortunately, that laptop was stolen. The family is not rich enough to buy another one immediately. The girl was bored and asked her mother if she could go to the park and play there instead. The mother said yes, and gave her a cellphone. On her third day at the park, someone asked the girl where her mother was, and she said, "At work". They called cops, and the mother was arrested. What's even more appalling is the tone of the TV news that reported it. They reported it as if a serious crime was actually committed. Is the world going crazy or what. It's not just America, though America is probably the frontrunner in this absurdity. I observe this utterly ridiculous tendency in parenting virtually anywhere in the first world. The fact of the matter is that kids are as safe as they were decades ago, if not safer, according to the actual stats. When I was a child, which was precisely decades ago, no one cared much about a nine-year-old girl without a parent "supervising" her playing at a crowded park "for hours at a time", not enough to call fucking cops anyway. And we certainly didn't even have that little gadget called cellphone back then. What the hell is wrong with today's parents, and the society at large? Does the adult who called cops, even after the girl told her that her mother was just "at work" and hadn't disappeared or anything, have a screw loose in her head? And actually arresting the mother? Everything in this story sounds crazy, but apparently that is the norm today. People are fricking obsessed with what-if's. "What if a man would've come and snatched the little girl?", said the woman interviewed by the TV crew. Yeah, what if someone would've come into your own fucking front yard and snatched your little girl? You can't say that kind of stuff has never happened. How dare you let her play in your own front yard! Total "stranger danger" paranoia. Parents today seem permanently frightened of the phantom evil supposedly lurking at every corner. "Kidnapped by a stranger" has always been such a rare crime that it doesn't even show up in any meaningful way on the crime statistics. I wonder where that paranoia came from. The mother's crime was that she trusted her nine-year-old daughter enough to let her play outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, instead of being locked in her work place suffocated with nothing to do. And she had to pay the price for that, by being jailed and separated from her daughter, who is apparently still in the custody of the Department of Social Services. The decline of civilization, I'm telling you. No wonder you don't see many children playing outside nowadays. I feel sorry for them. |
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Post by h on Jul 16, 2014 18:23:24 GMT 1
damn. id say they went overboard on that as well. cant wait to have kids!! :/
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gols
Novice Member
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Post by gols on Jul 16, 2014 22:07:55 GMT 1
I haven't been watching the BBC's version of events in Gaza, but I'm glad to see that Channel 4 news has been reporting from there directly on the civilians killed, hospitals bombed etc. They then had the customary interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev (there is a long feud between he and the presenter, I'm amazed he still agrees to go on the show) were he basically said that all Israel's actions are acceptable as long as Hamas continues to fire rockets. At one point, they were discussing the four children killed on the beach today, and he seemed to say that 'the operator who fired the rockets didn't know they were children' - which is surely an involuntary admission that they consider four random people on a beach as a legitimate target. The presenter didn't pick up on it unfortunately...
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Post by h on Jul 16, 2014 22:26:02 GMT 1
I haven't been watching the BBC's version of events in Gaza, but I'm glad to see that Channel 4 news has been reporting from there directly on the civilians killed, hospitals bombed etc. They then had the customary interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev (there is a long feud between he and the presenter, I'm amazed he still agrees to go on the show) were he basically said that all Israel's actions are acceptable as long as Hamas continues to fire rockets. At one point, they were discussing the four children killed on the beach today, and he seemed to say that 'the operator who fired the rockets didn't know they were children' - which is surely an involuntary admission that they consider four random people on a beach as a legitimate target. The presenter didn't pick up on it unfortunately... wow... |
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Post by h on Jul 16, 2014 22:26:08 GMT 1
I haven't been watching the BBC's version of events in Gaza, but I'm glad to see that Channel 4 news has been reporting from there directly on the civilians killed, hospitals bombed etc. They then had the customary interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev (there is a long feud between he and the presenter, I'm amazed he still agrees to go on the show) were he basically said that all Israel's actions are acceptable as long as Hamas continues to fire rockets. At one point, they were discussing the four children killed on the beach today, and he seemed to say that 'the operator who fired the rockets didn't know they were children' - which is surely an involuntary admission that they consider four random people on a beach as a legitimate target. The presenter didn't pick up on it unfortunately... wow... |
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 17, 2014 16:50:28 GMT 1
I haven't been watching the BBC's version of events in Gaza, but I'm glad to see that Channel 4 news has been reporting from there directly on the civilians killed, hospitals bombed etc. They then had the customary interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev (there is a long feud between he and the presenter, I'm amazed he still agrees to go on the show) were he basically said that all Israel's actions are acceptable as long as Hamas continues to fire rockets. At one point, they were discussing the four children killed on the beach today, and he seemed to say that 'the operator who fired the rockets didn't know they were children' - which is surely an involuntary admission that they consider four random people on a beach as a legitimate target. The presenter didn't pick up on it unfortunately... I don't have access to Channel 4, but Regev hasn't been doing such a good job promoting the Israel view, has he. Well, he's kind of forced to defend the indefensible, but even when he talks to rabid Israel supporters like CNN, he sounds like a Ron Ziegler having a severe hangover. Even the idiots who watch CNN and think that chief news anchor Wolf Blitzer - a former AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) researcher/editor - would ever say anything even remotely true about Israel (or anything, for that matter), should feel kinda uneasy watching that man talking like a slightly frightened Tasmanian reptile. I fail to see why they keep employing that man. He has this classic "I'm so empty that I don't even know what I'm hiding" look on his face. Who the spokesman is used to hardly matter when all the media unanimously whitewashed their behaviors, but it's a little different now. His pointless face represents the horrible pointlessness of the whole thing. Very depressing man. |
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 17, 2014 17:53:16 GMT 1
Did you know that at the current pace, the Ukrainian military casualties will be over 1,600 per year? That's a lot of casualties, considering that the situation in Ukraine hasn't developed into either an all-out war ala the American Civil War, or intense urban guerrilla war ala the Syrian Civil War yet. I kind of underestimated the military capabilities of the rebels. With the material support from Russia kept below the desired level, I thought they would struggle much harder to deal with the US-backed Kiev troops plus those "National Guard" people. Then, I read reports like this, and this. You know, those pathetic far-right "Whites are the ones discriminated against!" Anders-Breivik-lite types coming to Ukraine as volunteers for the "National Guard" militia, who fight on the Kiev side for now. For some reason, there are a disproportionate number of Swedes among them. I thought ABBA had killed all the testosterone in that part of the world. Or they indeed had, and that's precisely why those useless dudes come all the way to Ukraine like the Aussie college graduates heading en masse for South East Asia to "see the world out there". Yeah, I said "useless". I would say the military value of most of them is pretty close to nil. The articles linked above make a big-ish deal out of the fact that they are oh-so-scary far-right European racists, but the value of those pathetic men only lies in the fact that they are from very rich European countries, like Sweden. They are what Yanks like to call a "moral booster", and are there mostly for PR purposes. On the other hand, the "volunteers" for the rebels are coming mostly from, well, obviously Russia. But you are mistaken if you think they are "Russians". I'm pretty sure that few of them are, ethnically speaking. Russians love to talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk. Not many of them are very good fighters in actuality. When you talk about fighters from Russia, you talk about Chechens, Ossetians, Armenians, Dagestanis etc. They are not in the verbal karate business; they are in the rear naked choke business. So, you put a battle-hardened Armenian mofo and a Swedish psychology student in your imaginary cage and see what would happen. "Beat to a pulp" would be an understatement. Well, those Swedes are at least probably getting something that they don't quite get back in their home - sex, with local sympathizers, like the Aussies getting lots of sex in Bangkok. Good for them. Seriously, the Ukrainian military is really making an ass of itself. I don't think that has nothing to do with the tough sanctions the US announced yesterday, even targeting Rosneft and Gazprombank this time. The Kiev side is getting a tad desperate. |
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 17, 2014 19:52:22 GMT 1
OK, obviously the news of the Malaysian airline (again...) jet downed over Ukraine hadn't reached me when I posted the last one. Apparently about 300 people died instantly. I'm spooked by the timing of it, because I wrote that one thinking that no one was paying sufficient attention to what was going on in Ukraine, namely the Ukrainian military encircled by the rebels and trapped near the Russian border = bad publicity for Kiev.
But now, everyone is talking about Ukraine again. And given the nature and magnitude of what happened, expect a massive PR war.
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Post by h on Jul 18, 2014 0:44:31 GMT 1
just read about the plane being SHOT the fuck down. i thought it had just crashed. a freak accident. but no. it was fucking shot down. fucking bullshit.
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Post by miscmisc on Jul 18, 2014 6:56:40 GMT 1
Unfortunately this happens sometimes. The Soviets destroyed a South Korean airplane back in 1983, probably by accident. The US Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, killing about 300 people, and the commanding officer who made that mistake not only didn't own up to it, but was awarded the medal a few years later by President George Papa Bush.
Heck, only 12 years ago, the Ukrainian military shot down a Russian passenger airplane over the Black Sea by mistake, killing about 80 people instantly. But they at least apologized for that, although they kept denying for a week that they were responsible.
All the circumstantial evidence suggests that the rebels did it, probably by mistake. They were gloating just a couple of days ago over their successfully shooting down two Sukhoi-25 fighters and an An-26 transport plane in just the past week. They've got SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles), which have been giving the Ukrainian military a huge headache.
But there are still a lot of fishy details that I can't say anything with any certainty.
What's unbelievable is that apparently, the Malaysian airplane was cruising just 300+ meters (1,000 feet) above the restricted zone in Eastern Ukraine. Why was the plane allowed to fly in such a dangerous zone, only four days after the An-26 military transport plane was shot down in the same area? I had honestly thought that the entire airspace over the area had become a de facto no-fly zone, even if no one declared so officially. I would never allow my plane to go anywhere near that area if I were in charge of a commercial airline, regardless of the "official" guidance. It's hard to believe.
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