Play Nice Random Chat Thread V

[Del191229]

They bombed Fallujah with white phosphorus and napalm while there were civilians there. I used to have a copy of a video of the attack and it was fu**en horrific.

Hopefully Jim Molan dies in horrific pain from his cancer.

 

[giantroo]

Thread by @TareqBaconi on Thread Reader App

Thread by @TareqBaconi: Some lessons and reflections while observing Sheikh Jarrah from afar this past week // Thread 1. The quiet on the Palestinian street that international observers are fond of pointing to – us...…

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Some lessons and reflections while observing Sheikh Jarrah from afar this past week // Thread

1. The quiet on the Palestinian street that international observers are fond of pointing to – using terms like apathy, indifference, and pacification - are not signs of stability, acceptance, acquiescence or defeat. They are an indication of wishful thinking not of reality.

2. The real fragmentation that Palestinians suffer from, as a result of stratified legal rights and restrictions on movement, does not correspond to fragmentation in national sentiment, as the mobilization of 48 Palestinians – and other Palestinian constituencies - can attest.

3. The myth of partition is fragile and the green line is nothing more than an imagined temporal and geographic divide; Israelis and internationals decrying Sheikh Jarrah from their Palestinian homes west of the green line are exhibiting an untenable hypocrisy.

4. Said differently: Sheikh Jarrah is a lightning rod that shows one cannot condemn Israeli policies there while acquiescing to Zionist/Israeli practices of territorial consolidation and population transfer that have unfolded/continue to unfold throughout the land since pre-1948.

5. Terms Palestinians have long used to describe their struggle – including ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism and apartheid – have made it into the American hallways of power, with congresswomen like @RashidaTlaib and @IlhanMN leading the necessary realignment.

6. Moribund Palestinian politicians try using Jerusalem as an excuse to hold onto the status quo by deferring elections. Jerusalem shows an alternative path, as Pals have historically done when faced with the ineptitude of their elite leaders, by mobilizing on the street.

7. The veneer of legitimacy that Israel’s supreme court tries to cultivate in legalizing annexation and occupation crumbles under international scrutiny – meaning: under-utilized international pressure has been a key driver of Israeli expansionism.

8. Home demolitions and population transfers are not one-off instances of abuse; they are systematic policies of demographic engineering. Sheikh Jarrah, and Jerusalem, are microcosms of broader efforts to sustain Jewish territorial control from the river to the sea.

9. Money and international aid are being actively rejected by Palestinians mobilizing on the ground; the issue, again, is not one of humanitarianism and charity but of politics (look to point 1 for more on wishful thinking around pacification).

10. Israel's racialized application of power – through the courts, the police force, the border agents, the mayor, etc. – has been on full display in Sheikh Jarrah, and in the racist marches ripping through Jerusalem today, which are not an aberration but a symptom.

11. At the core of this is the crudeness of attempting to legalize a narrative of return for Jews to properties in Sheikh Jarrah while millions of Pals are denied any semblance of the same right. It is this racialized duplicity that sits at the heart of the entire episode.

 

[ferball]

For the most part. Though Saddam did his fair share of torturing. That’s where a lot of the Isis guys leaned it.

Saddam was a campaigner. But that doesn't justify what happened in that invasion and occupation we were part of.

 

[Del191229]

 

[Del191229]

Saddam was a campaigner. But that doesn't justify what happened in that invasion and occupation we were part of.

Oddly he wasn't a campaigner when he was gassing teenage Iranian conscripts on our behalf.

 

[giantroo]

Oddly he wasn't a campaigner when he was gassing teenage Iranian conscripts on our behalf.

Or much like OBL was a freedom fighter one day, a terrorist the next when they were done with him.

 

[ferball]

 

[ferball]

That's basically 30 years old.

 

[Del191229]

Or much like OBL was a freedom fighter one day, a terrorist the next when they were done with him.

Exactly. Or how Jamal Khashoggi went from being OBLs press officer to a beacon of Western free speech.

 

[Val Keating]

Saddam was a campaigner. But that doesn't justify what happened in that invasion and occupation we were part of.

Definitely. No war is justified when you look at it like that. I’m purely referring to the way there’s more scrutiny of what some marines did at abu ghraib then all the atrocities that took place there before the coalition turned up. There’s some stuff that I don’t even want to write about.

 

[ferball]

Definitely. No war is justified when you look at it like that. I’m purely referring to the way there’s more scrutiny of what some marines did at abu ghraib then all the atrocities that took place there before the coalition turned up. There’s some stuff that I don’t even want to write about.

The marines were acting on the orders of a democratically elected government that we aligned ourselves with.

Saddam's a campaigner but we are sposed to be better than that.

 

[ferball]

Okay "allegedly supposedly democratically elected government" given Bush stole those elections...

 

[bengrina]

They need to change the draft system to something similar to the NBA. Bottom 4 teams get the first 4 picks but are picked out of a ballet with the team that finished last having the highest percentage chance of receiving the first pick.

Something seriously wrong when I don't want us to beat the hawks this week , based on the preference to receive the number 1 pick

 

[giantroo]

 

[Del191229]

"They're going broke", ESB chair says coal plant closures now unavoidable

ESB chair says not to worry about when coal plants might close, because they're already going broke.

reneweconomy.com.au

 

[Val Keating]

Where’s that?

 

[DesertRoo]

 

[Del191229]

US taxpayer dollars sort of at work.

That thing would be useless in a real fight with say Hezbollah and Israel knows it.

 

[DesertRoo]

US taxpayer dollars sort of at work.

That thing would be useless in a real fight with say Hezbollah and Israel knows it.

Have you seen the next gen early warning, advanced targeting, integrated tanks?
Works basically the same, accept they use shells..
there’s a hell of a lot of tanks about that become air defence sites pretty quickly.

 

[giantroo]

Where’s that?

Gaza.

 

[Val Keating]

Gaza.

That’s terrible.

 

[Del191229]

Have you seen the next gen early warning, advanced targeting, integrated tanks?
Works basically the same, accept they use shells..
there’s a hell of a lot of tanks about that become air defence sites pretty quickly.

And there's no computer or AI powerful enough in the world, and won't be for many years, to deal with thousands of rockets swarming multiple cities simultaneously.

 

[DesertRoo]

And there's no computer or AI powerful enough in the world, and won't be for many years, to deal with thousands of rockets swarming multiple cities simultaneously.

Disagree, knowingly, computer speed was never the problem, it was always gaining enough sensor data for the trajectories.
You’ve seen it in action now.

 

[Kangaroos4eva]

US taxpayer dollars sort of at work.

That thing would be useless in a real fight with say Hezbollah and Israel knows it.

It is mostly for short ranged stuff and artillery shells. Try David's Sling being co-developed with Raytheon for the slightly bigger ballistic stuff.

Hezbollah wouldn't fight a conventional war anyway. It would be primarily asymmetrical warfare that renders most conventional technologies useless.

 

[Kangaroos4eva]

And there's no computer or AI powerful enough in the world, and won't be for many years, to deal with thousands of rockets swarming multiple cities simultaneously.

Ronald Reagan is rolling around in his grave...

All hail the Star Wars program.

Very few actors have that sort of rocket inventory and capability anyway. It is all about lethality, stealth, speed and range with rockets. i.e. IBCM's, cruise missiles, hypersonic, decoys, etc.