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bulletsponge13 posted:E- I'm not supporting either side, but it's hard not to find some sympathy for the people of Gaza; I feel the same way about Hamas as I did about the insurgents in Iraq: what else would we expect? Reminded me of that verse from the Tyler Childers song "Long Violent History". I can understand, empathize and agree with taking up arms against an occupier. Resistance is a natural right. Where you lose me is the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants and deliberate targeting of civilians. That's not resistance, it's terrorism and a war crime. That isn't meant to handwave away what Israel is doing with its airstrikes and cutting off food, water and fuel to Gaza. Both sides have plenty of blood on their hands and I feel for the innocent Palestinians and Israeli citizens who will bear the punishment for their leaders' crimes.
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Oct 12, 2023 16:07
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Arione posted:drat, these lego kits get more realistic every year. You suck if you think this is funny.
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Oct 13, 2023 04:02
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Pine Cone Jones posted:I feel like the past twenty years have nearly fully desensitized me to human suffering, especially with so much of it being on video, televised, or broadcast live. There's a point where it just becomes white noise or static in my brain and it just stops being a thing that gets processed. I really wish that people weren't so lovely overall and could just get along somehow. I've been a big fan of GoPro cameras for over a decade. And about six months ago, I got a DJI drone. I've had a lot of fun with both documenting my mountain bike rides and travel adventures and making stupid little videos that get 20 likes from my friends on Instagram, and then I see footage of Hamas committing atrocities in first-person video, and Israel releasing drone footage of a "target" being hit. War going real-time and prime-time should have had the effect of making the world go "yo, what the gently caress" and instead it's more like "yo, this is loving awesome" when it's their side wielding the camera. The sheer volume of horrifying poo poo being released in 4k really does desensitize and inure us all that hey, the world is not at all ok and all of this poo poo is really hosed up. I'd be lying if I said this hasn't taken a toll on me over the past few years especially. Combed Thunderclap posted:Not coincidentally I think the post-World War order that produced them is collapsing in parallel. The foundation has been eroding for a long time, but I think the first time I really understood this in practical terms was in 2014. Russia was invading eastern Ukraine with "little green men" while swearing up and down they weren't, and in the Middle East, the Islamic State was seizing vast amounts of territory across Syria and Iraq and releasing videos showing them blowing up the barrier sand berms and declaring an end to Sykes-Picot. I've always known that the international system was anarchic, but these two things especially really just demonstrated that the so-called rules-based international order basically existed by consent of those who created it. It's a fig leaf on state power's more barbarous instincts, and we've seen that writ large over the past decade especially. I haven't really posted about this here before, but from 2009-2010, I lived and worked in Egypt as an English language instructor. Most of my students were professional adults in their late 20s to late 30s, all of whom were educated and working for Egyptian firms that worked with larger multinational companies across a variety of sectors, be they oil/gas, banking, etc. The overwhelming majority of them were super friendly and decent people, but holy loving poo poo the amount of casual anti-Semitism I heard tossed around was loving appalling. I had students who were really friendly and kind to me talk about how they'd heard that six million Jews weren't really killed in the Holocaust or how the Mossad warned all New York Jews to stay away from the WTC on 9/11. I also had one student claim that Jews could fly. To be honest, the people who were least anti-Semitic were the few Salafi students I had because they interpreted the Quran so literally that they took the whole "People of the Book" thing so seriously that they merely saw Jews and Christians as people who hadn't come around to the teachings of Mohammed as revealed by Allah. This doesn't even begin to account for the insane conspiracy theories I had to occasionally dispel, such as the US preparing to invade Egypt and other like bullshit. And then you go to a place like Beirut, where even the walls of the nicest neighborhoods are still pockmarked by bullet holes from the Israeli occupation and the civil war. History has a long loving memory in this part of the world, and having been exposed to both sides of this conflict, it's easy to understand the paranoid, insular and aggressive mindset that Israel has and also easy to understand why the populations of neighboring states hate Israel in the ways that they do. There is absolutely nothing easy, clean or simple about any of this. I'm just so loving sick of seeing innocent people suffer.
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Oct 14, 2023 06:33
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A.o.D. posted:It has led to some delightful Khemri TV memes, however. https://twitter.com/MikeBeauvais/status/1215073526736195585
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Oct 16, 2023 02:14
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Israeli embassy in Jordan apparently besieged by hundreds of protestors trying to breach the grounds.
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Oct 17, 2023 20:31
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Handsome Ralph posted:Don't worry everyone, help is on the way What a loving chode. What does he expect to do other than get in the way?
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Oct 19, 2023 19:27
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Proud Christian Mom posted:The occupiers having a completely normal one Wait I thought Elon was all about freeze peach on the bird app now
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Oct 23, 2023 17:39
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The Wall Street Journal has really been pushing the whole Iranian involvement angle on the October 7 attack. Paywall-free link here:quote:TEL AVIV—In the weeks leading up to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, hundreds of the Palestinian Islamist militant group’s fighters received specialized combat training in Iran, according to people familiar with intelligence related to the assault. I don't think Iran had a direct role in planning the attack, but I'm betting that Israel finds a way to hit people in Iran that it thinks may have been part of the Hamas training aspect.
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Oct 26, 2023 12:08
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Looks like it's starting. https://israelpalestine.liveuamap.com/en/2023/27-october-israeli-army-spokesman-the-ground-forces-are-expanding
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Oct 27, 2023 19:42
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You know who are actual freedom fighters? The Kurds that Erdogan’s regime has been bombing heavily lately. gently caress him, his solidarity with Palestinians is only as deep as his need to distract the populace from how he has ruined Turkey.
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Oct 29, 2023 01:07
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Handsome Ralph posted:In fairness, from what friends with family in Israel have said, this isn't too far fetched. The way it was explained to me is people have a "When the immediate crisis is over, he's gotta go" Netanyahu has presided over so many bouts with Hamas in the nearly 15 years he's been in power that he absolutely owns 1. creating the conditions where Hamas would be able to conduct the 10/7 attack and 2. allowed his extremist political allies to escalate things in the West Bank to the degree that the IDF diverted resources away from Gaza 3. sowing so much discontent with his "judicial reforms" that it led to a public rift with commanders in the IDF, which is pretty unheard of for them. He absolutely can't survive this from a political standpoint, and if he did make yet another Faustian bargain to somehow stay in power, I think there's a non-zero chance that the IDF would remove him. Here's a paywall-free NYT article concerning the intelligence, military and political failures, which are too many to list here: https://archive.ph/DEY3c
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Nov 2, 2023 16:14
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Electric Wrigglies posted:And reportedly, that footage keeps getting deleted off the combat footage reddit so it is not a popular video with some at least to have out in the wild. I wonder if it is because people don't like to see IDF challenges or because it is Hamas fighting the IDF out in the scrub and not with three babies strapped to their RPG. Also no infantry support for the tanks, which makes them incredibly vulnerable to things like this. During the early days of the Syrian civil war, rebels took out a lot of Assad’s tanks by putting grenades in the turret barrel or throwing Molotovs on the engine block and then tossing grenades in the hatch when the crew would try to escape. The only thing I can think of in this case is that the Israelis were using tanks as artillery and didn’t expect to get engaged at all.
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Nov 3, 2023 10:25
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Discussion Quorum posted:It's not just one person but official policy, I guess? My best friend is Jewish and scammed his way on a Birthright trip like 15 years ago (he just wanted a free trip overseas and used it as a springboard to explore other places) and he said that even then the organizers were hugely pushing participants to find a nice Jewish boy/girl on their trip (or develop a crush on their IDF security detail), make Aliyah to Israel, and then have lots of Jewish babies. There's a sizable contingent of the Israeli population that sees demographics as triumph over the damage done to the Jewish people during the Holocaust and centuries of other pogroms, so I can at least understand the whole sperm retrieval thing even if it's pretty loving wacky otherwise.
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Nov 15, 2023 02:29
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FrozenVent posted:But then you don’t get the cum QRF. The Cum QRF: for the absolute last time that you hear “don’t worry, it happens to a lot of guys”
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Nov 15, 2023 03:36
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Count Roland posted:Not exactly the same thing, but during the Syrian civil war the US was providing ATGMs to al Nusra, I think. But they only sent replacement missiles if the rebels could provide video of them hitting a target with the first one. The videos of course went straight to YouTube. Minor quibble: the US never gave TOWs/ATGMs to Nusra. We gave them to “moderate” rebel groups who at least didn’t have any jihadist leanings, and yeah, they had to film each strike as a precondition to getting more. Nusra ended up with more than a few because they were basically like “hey, we want those missiles or we’ll kill your little group and your families and then take them.” You don’t have to have an MBA or Six Sigma black belt to know that arming Al-Qaeda is a bad idea.
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Nov 23, 2023 00:44
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It's not exactly a unique experience in the history of warfare for a small, attacking force that has the initiative (like Hamas arguably did on October 7) to rout a larger force, which seems to be exactly what happened here.
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Nov 23, 2023 21:04
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https://twitter.com/drelidavid/status/1729097251262181593 Seems like Rhodesian Lowtax felt compelled to visit Israel after his disastrous anti-Semitic tweets and feud with Media Matters from a week and a half ago.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:09
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Wrennic_26 posted:Source? Israel is a major perpetrator of espionage against the US, especially industrial espionage. A decade ago, a company I worked for was acquired by an Israeli firm, but the acquisition was blocked by the US government via the CFIUS process over concerns that the Israeli employees would have unrestricted access to sensitive travel data. Also, they try to honeypot American intelligence officers whenever they can. A former colleague of mine was former FBI, and he worked on some joint case with some Israeli intel types. One of them, a beautiful woman, basically threw herself at him and he recognized it for what it was and politely declined. He reported it to his counterintelligence counterpart, who laughed and said they barely even document each case when that happens.
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Nov 28, 2023 14:35
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M_Gargantua posted:Israel is also one of the major sources of off-the-shelf individual spyware software. Those are the sort of mass zero-day root exploit packages you generally see employed for espionage against another company or of surveillance on a unionizing workers. For an easy $10k you can just have all of someones DMs copy pasted to you in real time. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ This should be required listening. It's about the NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-espionage firm made up of (former?) Unit 8200 (Israel's SIGINT agency, similar to our NSA) and their selling of exploit tools to authoritarian regimes who use them to spy on human rights activists/journalists/political opposition figures. It's pretty fascinating, if not terrifying/revolting, stuff.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:59
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https://imgur.com/a/pPwx2jf Can someone explain why Musk’s PC looks so hosed up here? I know they’re supposed to extend from just below the collarbone to just above the navel but something about this looks seriously off. Maybe it’s because he has the build of a sack of potatoes but he’s making Jared Kushner look like an ~operator~ from when he wore one in Iraq.
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Nov 29, 2023 16:49
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Jesus loving Christ this thread was so much better when it was merely about Israel bombing the poo poo out of Palestinian civilians. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 3, 2023 00:06
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Google Jeb Bush posted:So if i wound up in Sri Lanka, I could choose to pay all my income taxes to Sri Lanka, a good country that has never engaged in war crimes, rather than to the US. or i could pay most of my income taxes to the US, a bad country, and the remainder to Sri Lanka I regret to inform you that you may need to Google the Tamil Tigers.
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Dec 7, 2023 02:20
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Grand Fromage posted:You also don't need to pay US federal taxes as an expat unless you're making a staggering amount of money. I think there are some states that require you to pay state taxes no matter what though. I paid US income tax as an ESL teacher in Egypt making not even US minimum wage (but enough to live like a god-king in Egypt). Uncle Sam will always have a hand in your pocket.
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Dec 7, 2023 03:08
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lightpole posted:I recall Jordan having Palestinian refugee camps that are indeed destabilizing or a focal point for the populace, they might provide examples of the consequences. Lebanon is the country that has the biggest problems with its Palestinian refugee camps. They're entirely self-policed (the Lebanese Armed Forces rarely if ever goes into them) and there are frequent clashes between rival militant groups. It's a pretty big mess and understandably none of the surrounding countries want that. Count Roland posted:
This is such a craven and awful thing that of course Sisi would probably do it. But North Sinai has had its own issues with Islamist insurgents going back well over a decade, and plunking down a bunch of "totally-not-refugees, bro, they're temporary guests" would absolutely give them a fresh new pool of people to recruit from.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:59
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Looks like Israel just did a drone strike in southern Beirut. https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-beirut-explosion-suburbs-hezbollah-israel-2a43fe948e8cb49c64b34bb963d77f64 quote:BEIRUT (AP) — The TV station of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group says top Hamas official Saleh Arouri was killed Tuesday in an explosion in a southern Beirut suburb. Other articles say the blast occurred in Dahiyeh, which is Hezbollah's main stronghold in Beirut. This definitely marks an escalation as Israel hasn't hit Beirut since the 2006 war.
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Jan 2, 2024 17:49
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Count Roland posted:Where else are there Hamas leaders? Qatar, Tunisia, Algeria all come to mind. I think Qatar was planning on kicking out the Hamas figures who have been in Doha because they don't want assassinations happening in their country. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' former political leader who was exiled to Damascus, found himself PNG'd after he publicly sided with the Syrian rebels against Bashar al-Assad. Not sure if Hamas' current pro-Iran leadership has a presence there again.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:14
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https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1742210055854789040 I guess when you've defended Jeffrey Epstein, defending Israel in the ICC is just the next logical rung in the Ladder of Tarnished Legacies.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:29
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Cugel the Clever posted:Shot Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's National Security Minister and a major member of the country's far right, tweeted this yesterday: https://twitter.com/itamarbengvir/status/1742291293307310186?t=YiV79H6JEUz0-k9oURIMFw&s=19 Translation: quote:Really appreciate the United States of America but with all due respect we are not another star on the American flag. The United States is our best friend, but first of all we will do what is best for the State of Israel: the migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers. So yeah, forced transfer and annexation sure does seem to be on the menu.
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Jan 3, 2024 21:32
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Fivemarks posted:It seems a bit, i dunno, hyper cynical? Like the author is jerking off about how crassly cynical they can be to people honestly asking for advice in good faith. GIP in the late 2000s to the mid-2010s was a wild place. This is a timeless classic from that era.
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Jan 14, 2024 08:21
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This is just loving embarrassing. quote:Pelosi Wants F.B.I. to Investigate Pro-Palestinian Protesters And of course this old ghoul is probably going to get reelected next year.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:47
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Personally, I think the rest of you warmongers all need to take a loving seat and realize that the Houthi movement is the last stand of freedom fighters wiling to stand up and confront Israel with whatever meager means they have. If it weren't for the Partisans of Allah, who else would stand up to the perfidious alliance of Zionists and Crusaders as they seek to move their cargo through the Red Sea? The treachery of the Zionist-Crusader alliance runs deep. A global cabal of neoconservatives, clearly the ones behind the actual 10/7 attack on plucky lil Israel, have been anticipating this very moment by planting libelous and disgusting stories about the rightly-guided Houthi movement. They've used their pawns in Human Rights Watch in fabricating the Houthi siege on Taiz and enlisted their running dogs in Amnesty International to spin fanciful tales of of torture and civilian displacement in areas under their control. Ignore these lies and instead cast your eyes to the sky, where you might be so fortunate as to catch a glimpse of a Houthi anti-ship missile, something they definitely developed on their own and certainly not because of the spurious, fictitious allegations that they're an Iranian cat's paw, as it streaks toward the Red Sea and the never-ending stream of Zionist cargo ships. Or, y'know, you do not in fact have to hand it to the loving Houthis and come to the conclusion that "gently caress Israel, gently caress Hamas, gently caress America, gently caress Saudi Arabia, gently caress Iran and gently caress the Houthis" is a perfectly moral and logical perspective in assessing this conflict.
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Jan 30, 2024 04:56
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Stringent posted:I've been thinking about it, trying to find a silver lining for the genocide going on in Gaza, and I think we can all agree that one good thing to come from all of this is finally informing the world about how terrible the Houthis are. I mean, before they started these recent rounds of attacks on shipping in solidarity with Gaza literally nobody was talking about their horrendous antisemitism or whatever. It's a shame it's taking a genocide to bring this to light, but you really have to be grateful to the true champions of truth and justice that have brought the perfidious Houthi to the forefront of the conversation without being distracted by the actions of Israel and their enabler the United States. gently caress off.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:06
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orange juche posted:You plan for the worst option. Egypt is refusing to take refugees but if Israel starts bombing the refugees huddled on the border they'll likely let them in, at the same time Egypt has said they will suspend the Camp David Accords if Israel does anything to the Palestinians on the border. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-786635 quote:But on Monday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry denied the AP report and said that Egypt would uphold the its accord with Israel, which the countries signed in 1979. The Egyptian military is basically a patronage network in uniform with an army that appears impressive in terms of manpower and equipment, but it is WOEFULLY unprepared to fight any kind of major war that isn't against its unarmed and defenseless people and its bloated officer corps is smart enough to know that. They are not going to risk their position of prestige and perks by getting the poo poo kicked out of them yet again. If anything, if Israel displaces Rafah into Egypt, the Egyptian government will throw a temper tantrum and get the US to pay them another billion dollars a year in
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Feb 16, 2024 17:28
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orange juche posted:Couldn't you say the same of the Saudi military lol, they get brand new American toys and get the poo poo kicked out of them by the Houthis on the reg, because they suck at military. Any chance to post this picture of a Saudi SOF guy with the optic on his weapon mounted backwards  So to answer your question, absolutely yes.
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Feb 16, 2024 17:37
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Active duty USAF member set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in DC today. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/man-sets-self-fire-israeli-embassy-air-force/ Critical condition with life threatening injuries. loving sad as hell.
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Feb 26, 2024 01:51
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When u want to say “stop drop and roll” but only “get down on the ground do it now or I’ll loving shoot you” comes out
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Feb 26, 2024 03:00
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https://archive.is/xgjXMquote:
This is conducting foreign policy and facilitating Israel’s war with the same kind of tactics a mob accountant would use to avoid hitting the dollar amount that requires the bank to notify the feds.
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Mar 6, 2024 18:36
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My Spirit Otter posted:jeez guys, almost like you need to disrupt the enemy's economy during war. gently caress yeah dude, all of those container ships full of missiles and bombs for Israel, just foundering at the bottom of the Red Sea. gently caress YEAH. Except lol wait no, it's aid shipments to loving Sudan that are being delayed because of the attacks on shipping. Guess it's just a matter of which genocide the Houthis care more about. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/feb/16/houthi-attacks-in-red-sea-having-a-catastrophic-effect-on-aid-to-sudan Meanwhile Biden is apparently going to reveal plans to build a port in Gaza and open up another land border crossing for humanitarian aid during SOTU tonight, which makes me wonder if Israel's going to dust off the USS Liberty playbook or regrettably blow up an aid convoy because they saw a Hamas fighter within 10 miles. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/biden-us-port-gaza-aid-delivery quote:
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Mar 7, 2024 18:33
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This is the company that is going to be running humanitarian aid out of the Gaza port- https://fogbow.ch They don't list any countries where they've operated, agencies that they've worked with or their actual technical capabilities, but their company leadership bios are, uh, interesting. Here's a few: quote:
quote:
And only one guy who actually seems to have a background in humanitarian assistance: quote:
This looks like the board of a company bidding on a vendor contract with JSOC, not who I would have expected to be running humanitarian shipments into Gaza. Would have figured that there would have been Army SF or Civil Affairs types here given that they actually have experience providing humanitarian assistance in semi-permissive or denied areas rather than the guys who show up, kill everything on target and then write a book about it.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:00
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Even if this won’t go through until 2029, it’s still remarkably lovely that the US is considering selling $18 billion worth of F-15s to Israel, as if they could ever be outgunned by any of their neighbors. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/us/politics/biden-israel-weapons-deal.html
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Apr 3, 2024 06:43
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