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Hong XiuQuan posted:... I feel like we're heading to the lowest turnout election ever. What's the other option besides Biden? The guy that's already saying he's going to do Muslim Ban 2 the first day he's in office, and backed by people who think Biden's a weakling because he's not going even harder with military support?
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Dec 11, 2023 17:39
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I was looking into how electoral preferences of Muslim and Arab voters can influence the election, and apparently there were already some tensions between Biden and relevant Dem groups. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/no-ceasefire-gaza-no-votes-muslim-americans-tell-biden-2023-10-31/ I couldn't find if the ultimatum is still relevant after the now-failed ceasefire. NMDC still have it on their website, though https://www.muslimdems.org/2023_ceasefire_ultimatum Also, from the article I was surprised to learn/be reminded that 35% of Muslims already supported Trump in 2020, so maybe Biden will simply choose not to care about losing 20-30% more of Muslim/Arab vote.
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Dec 11, 2023 17:43
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Jimbozig posted:Nobody said kidnapping was victimless. Hell, even passing a fake bill isn't completely victimless! You don't get to complain about strawmen when your entire argument is a fallacy. quote:With this comparison, I am using a small-scale example to demonstrate my point. The point is not that kidnapping is like counterfeiting. Kidnapping is, actually, nothing like counterfeiting. quote:The point is that kidnapping is so much smaller than genocide, in the same way that counterfeiting is so much smaller than a single extrajudicial murder. That is the comparison being made here. Yes and as an argument it makes no sense and is blatantly fallacious. "This crime doesn't matter because i can imagine another bigger crime". Genocide is meaningless in the grand scheme of our impotence in the greater universe, etc. It's asinine. quote:In order to argue against this comparison, you would have to say that kidnapping is actually not a much smaller crime than genocide, and that they are of similar scale. Again, the fact that you believe the crime of genocide is "larger" than the crime of kidnapping is has absolutely no meaning. It is a wholly irrelevant red herring. At no level is false imprisonment of an innocent person justified. The existence of more heinous crimes doesn't justify it. The death of innocent people doesn't make the death of other innocent people just. MadSparkle posted:Right so, as I have been asking, because I am not clear here, how it is a ton of people, mostly women and children, are being held as prisoners for many years, without a whole lot, if any evidence, and yet they are not "hostages", but merely are considered prisoners. The term seems to be only getting applied in the sense that only Hamas and Palestine has hostages. Israel has "prisoners". I'm going to repeat myself a third time: I also fail to see how "Israeli prisons are awful" and "Hamas should let their kidnapping victims go" are mutually exclusive opinions. It's a false dichotomy to say only one side can be committing war crimes at a time, especially when the vast majority of that violence is being perpetrated against civilians and not the people engaged in fighting. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 11, 2023 18:18
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:I feel like we're heading to the lowest turnout election ever. What's the other option besides Biden? The guy that's already saying he's going to do Muslim Ban 2 the first day he's in office, and backed by people who think Biden's a weakling because he's not going even harder with military support? I get the argument. "Vote for the guy who won't ban Muslims". The problem with it is Biden is the dude saying "here's as many weapons as you like to kill Arabs/Muslims". Who do you think comes across as the more racist? The guy promising to stop a few extra visas for Gulf Arabs or the guy actively participating in the murder of tens of thousands? The argument should generally be more wide-ranging. Trump is obviously a corrupt bastard who will make America worse. It's still a hard sell for why a minority group should vote for someone who's treated them in this way.
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Dec 11, 2023 18:28
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I get the argument. "Vote for the guy who won't ban Muslims". The problem with it is Biden is the dude saying "here's as many weapons as you like to kill Arabs/Muslims". Did Trump say anything about not sending weapons to Israel? From what I can tell, after his initial praise of Hezbollah's 'smartness', he switched back to the usual full-throated support of Israel. E: Biden still can and probably will lose Muslim/Arab voters, it's just not that he'll lose them to Trump. Some will vote 3rd party, some won't vote at all. Paladinus fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 18:42
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Xombie posted:I also fail to see how "Israeli prisons are awful" and "Hamas should let their kidnapping victims go" are mutually exclusive opinions. It's a false dichotomy to say only one side can be committing war crimes at a time, especially when the vast majority of that violence is being perpetrated against civilians and not the people engaged in fighting. Hong XiuQuan posted:I get the argument. "Vote for the guy who won't ban Muslims". The problem with it is Biden is the dude saying "here's as many weapons as you like to kill Arabs/Muslims". Nobody has to vote for anyone of course. Letting Trump get elected is just going to be worse for everyone.
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Dec 11, 2023 18:44
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Biden is just as racist as Trump. He has used his power as a senator to push through some horrifically racist laws. He is at least partly to blame for why our prison system is the way it is now. Trump just likes saying the n-word, but Biden has had decades of actual real power over people, and has joyfully used that power to enact a lot of suffering on people of color. What I want is for the DNC to ask Biden to step aside and let another democrat run in 2024. Obviously this is unrealistic and would never happen in a million years. I said come in! fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 18:47
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enahs posted:Is there a term for the practice of people constantly (or at least partially) misinterpreting the other side's argument, expressing outrage/judgment at the misinterpreted argument they've imagined, and claiming ignorance of how the other side could misunderstand their own arguments? I feel like I've seen it several times in this thread and it is very tiresome to read, especially when it is the same argument that has been had before, just with different posters. I believe the first time I saw it was regarding reports of decapitated babies, then the Al-Shifa hospital bombing, and now sexual assault. It feels similar to whataboutism and gish galloping, but distinct from that. It's just a straight distraction. It refocuses the discussion into a context where the only counterpoint is absolutely monstrous, so there's no discussion to be had. Now the conversation is about (theoretical) rape gangs and a single kidnapped baby Instead of the systematic extermination of a people and new war crimes on a daily basis. Because that kind of distraction can squeak out, at best either a "both sides are bad," or atrocity fatigue - Which are both always a win for the oppressor. It's the same "he was no angel" bullshit that was used against George Floyd. And it works, as a low-effort troll. It's not breaking any rules, is technically true, and can be repeated forever without losing effectiveness. If you're lucky, it'll take on a life of its own and people will spin their wheels comparing kidnapping to counterfeiting instead of, you know, some other current event.
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Dec 11, 2023 18:53
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moths posted:It's just a straight distraction. I mostly lurk this thread and don't want to get into the discussion about which side did what and whether or not Hamas is justified in using the tactics they have. However, on the meta-discussion level, I feel like calling it a distraction tactic in this thread ignores a core part of why the thread focuses on Hamas' crimes more for periods of time: it's the only part of the conflict where there is real disagreement and this is a debating and discussion forum. Other than the occasional crazy person who wanders in for three posts, everyone here agrees that what Israel is doing is horrifying and completely unjustified. Almost every poster ITT believes basically all of the reported atrocities that the IDF has and is committing. It's not an interesting discussion to just post the latest horrifying causality reports, there's nothing to debate if essentially everyone is onboard with saying that Israel should unilaterally withdraw and cease hostilities. So of course a ton of the posts end up being about things like whether or not oppressed people have more moral leeway to ignore formal and customary laws of war, as people ITT have deep seated opinions on either extreme of this debate. People ITT also have a much wider range of scepticism surrounding claims of Hamas' atrocities, some to the point of basically saying circumstantial evidence is worthless, which is a pretty extreme epistemic point to make and some people ITT really buy into third hand accounts with credulity. Of course the discussion will circle around the areas of disagreement when the alternative is bleakly posting updates about the continued genocide. Now, I agree that in other areas, like media coverage and the public discussion, Hamas' comparatively small breaches of international law are in fact brought up simply to distract. But I don't think most people ITT are doing this either consciously or unconsciously.
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Dec 11, 2023 19:23
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I said come in! posted:Biden is just as racist as Trump. He has used his power as a senator to push through some horrifically racist laws. He is at least partly to blame for why our prison system is the way it is now. Trump just likes saying the n-word, but Biden has had decades of actual real power over people, and has joyfully used that power to enact a lot of suffering on people of color. I feel like this shouldn't need to be said, but this kind of Donald the Dove style argument is ridiculous. For an easy example to show that Trump liked to do more than "saying the n-word", we can look at him killing civilian minorities via drones at a higher rate than even Obama. quote:2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars. Kalit fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 19:49
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Kalit posted:I feel like this shouldn't need to be said, but this kind of Donald the Dove style argument is ridiculous. What you quoted was talking about Biden having a negative impact against POC. Do you agree or disagree with that?
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Dec 11, 2023 21:29
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The Sean posted:What you quoted was talking about Biden having a negative impact against POC. Do you agree or disagree with that? For reference, I usually include the whole post even when referring to specific parts of someone's post. This is to ensure I don't accidentally erase context. When I do this, I usually bold the part I'm specifically referencing. So, in this, I was specifically referencing the inference of Trump only saying racist things but not actually implementing racist policies (from the "just likes saying" part and then comparing it to a different person who has implemented racist policies). I was not trying to dispute that Biden has implemented racist policies before. Kalit fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 21:35
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I'm also struggling to see which alternative credible Democratic nominee would have a different policy to the one Biden has, which was the main point of the post.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:06
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:If that's the case, you have more faith in the persuasiveness of liberal ideology than I do. I don't think most of these leaders in the world find that very enticing compared to military support or the U.S. as a market for their exports. I think the Chinese can be less annoying to many governments because they don't come in with ideology, they just want to do business. Irony Be My Shield posted:This logic doesn't make any sense. Israel is the US ally, not Palestine, and we've seen how much of a difference that has made for them throughout the conflict. If the US suddenly decided to cut Israel loose then that would massively undermine US defence guarantees. US Hegemony is different from a US Alliance, it's the tolerance of a US-first world order, where the interests of the US are the default answer. For that to work, the US has to be accepted as the best option. Since the US cannot compete here in terms of legacy or economics, we were trying to position ourselves as such on the basis of morality; we're the good guys, we stand up for the little guys, even if it costs us*. That Israel is our ally isn't a good enough disclaimer to excuse genocide while pursuing that goal. This narrative has undergirded a lot of the justification for our actions: it's good to stand up for Ukraine because Russia is doing an Imperialism on them. Ditto for Taiwan. It's good to fund random groups in Syria to overthrow Assad because he's gassing civilians. We thought it was good to destroy Libya because we thought Gaddafi was training black mercenaries in the art of super-rape. We aren't publicly taking a side in the Ethiopia conflict because there isn't an easy narrative on who's the good guys. We need to take action against China because they're culturally genociding the Uyghur. It was bad for us to leave Afghanistan because now women can't learn to read. This is all bullshit, we did all of that for other, more cynical reasons, but it's the excuses that help massage the radiation of ire in the rest of the world. We don't have that for this war; it's entirely "our unjust colony got hit, so now it's okay to kill every baby in Gaza." And every Arab from America to China can see that. It's an affirmation that the US of 2023 is still the US of 2001. *the EU As for why this is important, you can look to the USSR; US hegemony became so appealing that the artistic, liberal classes 'bought in' to its ideology, liberalizing the USSR's economy and politics in a way that, intentionally or unintentionally, caused the complete collapse of the system. We didn't need to make a formal alliance in exchange for a transition to Capitalism & US hegemony until Yeltsin & Gorbachev had already done the work for us. A similar engine was driving normalization in the middle east; the subjugation of Palestinians was abhorrent, but so long as they weren't being literally slaughtered en masse middle-class Arabs could accept it as an unfortunate inevitability that could be glossed over in service of buying into the Rules-Based International Order. This war, and more importantly our full-throated endorsement of the war & willfull blindness towards its atrocities, has shattered the illusion of justice. It's a have & have-not system, and no allegiance is ever going to make the US consider Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia more white (and therefore more Have) than Israel. Even if the dictators don't care about this (they still get paid either way) it matters for the artists, the petit bureaucrats, the liberals, the cultural leaders, the people who launder the consent of the governed. Anyways, crossposting this; some tangible evidence that Hamas' weapons are pretty effective against the IDF vehicles. https://twitter.com/AryJeay/status/...ingawful.com%2F They're saying in the video that nobody was harmed, so it's possible that they are at least effective at reducing casualties (in which case the lions share of deaths are probably from Hamas snipers & infantry), but it does mean Israel ends up down a vehicle. Neurolimal fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 22:38
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:I feel like we're heading to the lowest turnout election ever. What's the other option besides Biden? The guy that's already saying he's going to do Muslim Ban 2 the first day he's in office, and backed by people who think Biden's a weakling because he's not going even harder with military support? In all seriousness: Do you know any Muslims/Arabs? I can't point you to a study or survey (and I doubt that one really exists), but anecdotally, the consensus opinion in my wife's family group chat (they're all first or second generation Pakistani immigrants, most of whom have lived in other ME countries before coming to the US) is that the US under Trump would still be the least repressive country most of them have lived in.* They have a completely different frame of reference for oppression than most US born white people at least. E.g. my wife's grandpa, who has been a US citizen for decades, STILL won't say anything negative about the Saudi royal family b/c he was a professor there for a while and one of his colleagues got disappeared for some mild criticism. Biden denying the casualties in Gaza was the breaking point. To them, it looks like he's explicitly valuing Muslim lives less than others. They view Trump as bad, but not as bad as other governments they've lived under, and certainly not bad enough to justify voting for a guy who (in their view) is openly supporting genocide against people like them. * Actually they love to joke that Pakistan is the freest country on Earth - if the government's too incompetent to enforce the laws, you're free to do anything you want :P
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Dec 11, 2023 23:11
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Gnumonic posted:In all seriousness: Do you know any Muslims/Arabs? This aligns with my experience as well. People I've known for a long time who were anywhere from consistent D-voters to people who considered themselves completely apolitical are furious at Biden. Every single Muslim or Arabic person I know identifies with the Palestinian struggle in a way that Democrats didn't broadly see with things like eg. Latino voters and migrants at the border/kids in cages. It feels very different. Who knows if this sentiment will persist until election time or if it'll cause Biden to lose any states, but Biden's zionist sympathies and the Democrats' addiciton to APAIC money is looking more like a massive liability the longer israel continues it's genocidal campaign
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Dec 11, 2023 23:41
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Neurolimal posted:Anyways, crossposting this; some tangible evidence that Hamas' weapons are pretty effective against the IDF vehicles. It's an APC. I don't think anyone suggested that Israeli APCs were especially strong against RPGs. In fact, in the first days of the ground operation, 10 soldiers died when their APC was hit by Hamas. https://hamodia.com/2023/11/01/idf-9-soldiers-killed-when-rocket-strikes-apc/
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Dec 12, 2023 00:20
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Paladinus posted:It's an APC. I don't think anyone suggested that Israeli APCs were especially strong against RPGs. [/url] israel has, the namer is supposed to be more heavily armored than thr merkava, which israel says is the best protected tank in the world
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Dec 12, 2023 00:30
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OctaMurk posted:israel has, the namer is supposed to be more heavily armored than thr merkava, which israel says is the best protected tank in the world I can't find exact statements to that effect but I guess I can see them hyping it up like everything else. Looking further into it, however, the one destroyed in November, was hit by a Kornet missile, not an RPG. Don't think any of Hamas' videos showed them using Kornets. How many of those are available to Hamas is hard to tell, although at least one Israeli researcher suggested that a substantial amount of them could have been smuggled in. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israel-combats-the-kornet-anti-tank-missile-1001461332 quote:He adds that it is difficult to estimate how many such missiles Hamas and Hezbollah possess, but because the Iranians produce the Kornet themselves, they can produce thousands of them, and smuggle in considerable quantities. "My assessment is that a great many weapons were smuggled through Sinai."
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Dec 12, 2023 01:29
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From some very rough research, feel free to poke holes in it: They refer to the APC as an Achzarit, which is a SU T-54/T-55 design that is repurposed into an APC by losing the turret and getting more armor bolted on. T-55 armor thickness: 120mm (4.7in) front, 80mm (3.15in) sides, 45mm (1.77in) rear, 30mm (1.18in) roof. The roof normally enjoyed the protection of the turret, which boasted 200mm (7.87in) armor in the front, so losing that means most of the up-armoring would probably go there unless they were confident that the thing would never take a hit from above.  Hard to find specifications (at least for me), but I'm seeing some boasting of the Achzarit armor reaching up to 200mm (7.87in) thickness, and that the roof has ERA bricks. The T-55 weighs 36 tonnes, whereas the Achzarit weighs 44, and that's having excised the turret, so you can be sure that it has quite a bit of protection. The Mk.2 variant supposedly has even more armor. Also hard to gauge the thickness of Merkava armor, especially because if you google anything about the Merkava you get vacuous articles masturbating about how badass it is (followed by War Thunder threads complaining that Merkava armor isn't OP in the game, citing those articles), but we do have some images of the Merkava 1/2:   These tanks were designed when Israel had fewer resources and next to no design experience, so a lot of it is cribbed from tanks they managed to pilfer or information provided by other countries. From what I could gather? Israel never bothered with ERA on these two versions, because [from what I understand] for ERA to work the armor has to be thick enough to withstand the explosion of the ERA itself, which the Merkava might not have been able to. From what I could find almost half? of Israel's tanks are these two versions. Merkava's 3 & 4 are more unique and use modular armor, though I'm not sure how many improvements were made to the rear (where Hamas seems to prefer to hit). Again, this is all someone with no military expertise briefly scrambling through poorly written miltech websites, so I'm interested in any corrections. I also found these, allegedly from a deal that was in negotiations for China to produce Merkava 3's, but I couldn't find anything to substantiate it:  
Neurolimal fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 01:31
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Neurolimal posted:Also hard to gauge the thickness of Merkava armor, especially because if you google anything about the Merkava you get vacuous articles masturbating about how badass it is (followed by War Thunder threads complaining that Merkava armor isn't OP in the game, citing those articles), but we do have some images of the Merkava 1/2: One of the things I recall about the Merkava is that the engine is in the front of the tank to provide additional crew protection and I can definitely think that may have been a compromise if they couldn't produce a front glacis thick enough to withstand most tanks.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:49
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Neurolimal posted:This narrative has undergirded a lot of the justification for our actions: it's good to stand up for Ukraine because Russia is doing an Imperialism on them. Ditto for Taiwan. It's good to fund random groups in Syria to overthrow Assad because he's gassing civilians. We thought it was good to destroy Libya because we thought Gaddafi was training black mercenaries in the art of super-rape. We aren't publicly taking a side in the Ethiopia conflict because there isn't an easy narrative on who's the good guys. We need to take action against China because they're culturally genociding the Uyghur. It was bad for us to leave Afghanistan because now women can't learn to read. This is all bullshit, we did all of that for other, more cynical reasons, but it's the excuses that help massage the radiation of ire in the rest of the world. We don't have that for this war; it's entirely "our unjust colony got hit, so now it's okay to kill every baby in Gaza." And every Arab from America to China can see that. It's an affirmation that the US of 2023 is still the US of 2001. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 05:02
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:This aligns with my experience as well. People I've known for a long time who were anywhere from consistent D-voters to people who considered themselves completely apolitical are furious at Biden. Every single Muslim or Arabic person I know identifies with the Palestinian struggle in a way that Democrats didn't broadly see with things like eg. Latino voters and migrants at the border/kids in cages. It feels very different. Who knows if this sentiment will persist until election time or if it'll cause Biden to lose any states, but Biden's zionist sympathies and the Democrats' addiciton to APAIC money is looking more like a massive liability the longer israel continues it's genocidal campaign It's true, for Arabs, the issue of Gaza has always hit straight to the heart. And there's a lot of frustration at being American while still being torn while seeing what's happening, and feeling how much of an enormous gap is there, while trying to connect to the rest of the country at a time like this. You feel your "otherness" and the disconnect more, because even well-meaning friends and acquaintances can't fully connect to what you're feeling, so it creates genuine loneliness and highlights the endless frustration of not entirely belonging or being understood. Most are horrified and furious at Biden's behaviour, having only expected some lip service and some support like the "normal" amount despite how they weren't crazy about it. But we weren't expecting such an ostentatious display to the exclusion of what we thought. It's concerning to say the least, and feels very alienating. It's very "If you're not with us, you're against us" rhetoric, no surprise, but I think a lot of us thought we were past that point. Naive, hopeful, trying to be optimistic. A little American even, one might say. EDIT : As a rather obvious aside, Arabs and Muslims have very long memories with regard to the Palestinian issue , it isn't one which will be forgotten even if they're American citizens. Biden might indeed win, but it won't be because that group has forgotten anything. It might not be a big enough group to make him lose, but I think democrats are underestimating how much of a dent will be left. MadSparkle fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 05:25
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https://twitter.com/melissaeweiss/status/1734382602524426346 (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 12, 2023 05:55
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Every time I think Biden can't say something grosser about Israel than he already has I am proven wrong. Even more galling than the "actually Jews in the US, the country I am president of, are not safe", there's the obvious fact that Israel has made the world less safe for Jews in the diaspora.
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Dec 12, 2023 06:18
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Edit: Oops "If you don't support what I'm doing then you're not really Jewish because see I'm protecting you" sounds really out of touch. But I don't know, maybe some are like omg Biden I thank you for that? He's living several decades ago. and it shows. MadSparkle fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 06:31
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Yawgmoft posted:Even more galling than the "actually Jews in the US, the country I am president of, are not safe", there's the obvious fact that Israel has made the world less safe for Jews in the diaspora. This isn't obvious, it's not even a fact. We have no way of knowing this because the counter-factual (what if there was no Israel) is so distant from our reality that anything we say about it is just motivated speculation. The "Israel makes diaspora Jews unsafe" line presumes that a significant amount of anti-Zionist fervor necessarily produces a significant amount of antisemitic violence. I think the past few months have shown that even when Israel provokes profound global outrage, the actual safety of Jews isn't significantly affected. I trust there's been a real uptick in hateful speech or vandalism but I don't know of any actual violence that's been conducted against diaspora Jews outside one stabbing in France that might've happened even if Israel had not been killing thousands.of Palestinians or existed at all. Of course even if Israel makes Jews safer than otherwise, that doesn't and can't justify the displacement and humiliation of a basically equivalent number of Palestinians. Turning the Jewish question into the Palestinian question isn't progress, it's mania. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 07:50
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I see the Israelis are using 'cope cages' (as the Ukraine thread puts it) like the Russians. Do they actually work?
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Dec 12, 2023 07:54
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I can imagine that Biden's stance on Gaza causes some dem voters to stay home on principle. I can't imagine it's as many as the voters he'd lose directly to Trump if he turned against Israel though.
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Dec 12, 2023 08:46
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I can imagine that Biden's stance on Gaza causes some dem voters to stay home on principle. I can't imagine it's as many as the voters he'd lose directly to Trump if he turned against Israel though.
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Dec 12, 2023 09:32
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mobby_6kl posted:
This is exactly what I mean. Your frame of reference = 'Trump bad. Eg Muslim Ban. Eg Israel embassy. Eg likes Netanyahu'. The frame of reference for many Palestinian-Americans, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans is: 'Biden has full-throatedly supported the murder of over 20,000 people. Biden has refused to protect US lives in Gaza. Biden is supporting a genocide. Biden's congressional democrats censure our few representatives. Biden's congressional democrats call us all antisemites. Biden's government is likely to ostracise our children in schools and universities. [the list goes on]' and worst of all 'Biden thinks so little of our vote, he takes it so for granted, that he feels able to do this in the open.' They won't all (or maybe even the majority won't) vote for Trump. I absolutely don't blame them. e: I mean to really emphasise this different framework for viewing politics. These American families will all be parts of communal whatsapp groups sharing images day-after-day of children with their brains leaking out of their heads, flopping about in the arms of crying medics. They'll see the executions. They'll see the horrific aftermath of bombings. Not a day of it but two whole months of it. While Biden is hobbling about gurning and saying "Wow, Israel. Y'know, if it didn't exist we'd just have to invent her hoo boy. Jews have nowhere to feel safe!" and ignoring a Pal-American kid who won't be able to walk again because he wore a keffiyeh or the six-year-old stabbed to death because the media convinced a psycho Palestinians were about to terror America to death. Hong XiuQuan fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 10:05
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Brucolac posted:That's a false dichotomy. Eh. I think if the proposition is a simple "Biden should evaluate whether he'll lose more votes by being pro Israel or being anti Israel", the answer is going to be very unpleasant. i also think the biden admin position is in aggregate that they should support israel in public (bad) and send them military aid (very bad), while telling them to settle down in private (good) and every day that goes by makes that a more ill-advised position, what with the dead palestinians and razed residential areas but we still probably don't want the calculus to be 100% vote based, because there are an awful lot of Israel-lovers in the United States, and while the current atrocities are moving that needle it's not moved far enough... probably
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Dec 12, 2023 10:14
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i guess my take on personal action is that we should talk to people about how awful Israeli atrocities are if it comes up in conversation
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Dec 12, 2023 10:17
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https://x.com/aor3138/status/1734470254997245993?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q Yemen is officially blockading sea shipping routes to Israel.
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Dec 12, 2023 10:42
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https://x.com/AnimalFriendsSh/status/1734504427199869167?s=20 Please donate if you can: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/samer563
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Dec 12, 2023 11:15
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Yawgmoft posted:Every time I think Biden can't say something grosser about Israel than he already has I am proven wrong. I still think his original "If Israel didn't exist, we'd have to invent it, to FURTHER OUR INTERESTS IN THE REGION. Best 3 billion we spend!" quote is more revealing and despicable, and done well before he started visibly decaying, too, so you knew it was earnest. It was a classic case of mediocre party-machine rear end-kisser letting loose a bit and cosplaying as grand imperial chessmaster.
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Dec 12, 2023 11:25
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Google Jeb Bush posted:Eh. I think if the proposition is a simple "Biden should evaluate whether he'll lose more votes by being pro Israel or being anti Israel", the answer is going to be very unpleasant. I don't think anyone honestly expects Biden to be anti-Israel in any meaningful sense, but there's widespread support for a ceasefire and it's hard to imagine that he'd lose a significant amount of support if he would do things like: not bypass congressional approval or human-rights audits on weapons transfers. He has options which would not likely cost him many votes that he could use to signal some kind of token opposition to (what I take to be a) genocide, and he's choosing not to exercise any of them.
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Dec 12, 2023 12:08
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Autisanal Cheese posted:I see the Israelis are using 'cope cages' (as the Ukraine thread puts it) like the Russians. Do they actually work? They're better than nothing and conceptually easy to install.
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Dec 12, 2023 14:05
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According to the IDF, at least 20 out of the 105 confirmed Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza were due to friendly fire and accidents. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-deaths-of-20-out-of-105-soldiers-killed-in-gaza-op-were-friendly-fire-accidents/ quote:Thirteen of the soldiers were killed by friendly fire due to mistaken identification in airstrikes, tank shelling, and gunfire. Why would they publicly acknowledge such staggering incompetence? I guess, it at least makes the 105 more believable, because if they wanted to cover things up, they would have also tried to cover up the almost comical ineptitude on display in that report. Autisanal Cheese posted:I see the Israelis are using 'cope cages' (as the Ukraine thread puts it) like the Russians. Do they actually work? They are also used by Ukraine. It has a slight chance of protecting from a cheap drone dropping a grenade on you, but not much else. There are, however, a lot of cheap drones dropping grenades used in modern warfare, apparently. Paladinus fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Dec 12, 2023 |
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Dec 12, 2023 14:08
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Dandywalken posted:They're better than nothing and conceptually easy to install. Calling it a "cope cage" is stupid. It looks dumb but it works. That's more important than aesthetics if you're trying to avoid jets of hypersonic metal. Slat armor is cheap and easy to add, so it's worth it even in situations where it's nowhere near 100% effective.
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Dec 12, 2023 14:18
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