• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Actually no. Netanyahu may be unpopular but he’s been able to avoid elections for a year now.

    And Hamas cannot be stopped militarily; killing all these civilians only makes more people support the group. What WOULD cause Hamas to lose support would be to empower moderates, but Netanyahu has spent the last 17 years undermining them and deligitimizing them, even arming Hamas so Palestinians would fight one another. Smotrich yesterday announcing he’s withholding Palestinian tax money to the PA only makes the PA look even weaker since even moderates are unacceptable to the Israeli government and will suffer under Israeli rule despite cooperating with them.



  • Are you trying to say that whoever puts military bases near civilians is willfully endangering civilians?

    Yes according to Israeli logic based on what they say about Palestinians and Lebanese. Their behavior is hypocritical.

    I think considerations about threat of attack come into play, and how great that risk is.

    Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran have all directly targeted these military installations, some in cities, and Israeli PR hollowly complains about how civilians are put in peril.


  • Talk about cherry picking an opinion piece. Of course you’d promote someone who says what you want to hear and ignore the many many Palestinian op-Ed’s who don’t.

    I love any Palestinian who supports peace but this guy made some blatant historical errors. In 2007, Fatah engaged in a coup against the PA since they couldn’t accept the election result. Israel publicly supported the coup, even with the prime minister publicly urging the Knesset to send weapons to Fatah so they could complete the coup. The coup attempt failed, which is why Hamas controlled Gaza while Fatah controlled West Bank. Netanyahu publicly supported Hamas through this with money, which is why the Israel press has been tearing into him for the last 6 months.

    If you want a more mainstream Palestinian voice, I’d recommend Khaled Elgindy who has previously worked with the White House on negotiations. Not this guy who whitewashes Israeli crimes in hopes he could get picked to help run the occupation.







  • Realistically Likud and the Jewish Power Party needs to be neutered politically. Why is nobody talking about how Israel has convicted terrorists in its cabinet while at the same time complaining that Palestinians should have popular political parties banned? Rightwing extremism on one side begets rightwing extremism by the other side in response. This has been the case for over 30 years, we just had the 30 year anniversary of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein’s massacre which kicked of Hamas’ wave of bombings in Israel.










  • ”I had originally not wanted to see [Galaxy Quest] because I heard that it was making fun of Star Trek and then Jonathan Frakes rang me up and said ‘You must not miss this movie! See it on a Saturday night in a full theatre.’ And I did and of course I found it was brilliant. Brilliant.

    ”No one laughed louder or longer in the cinema than I did, but the idea that the ship was saved and all of our heroes in that movie were saved simply by the fact that there were fans who did understand the scientific principles on which the ship worked was absolutely wonderful. And it was both funny and also touching in that it paid tribute to the dedication of these fans.”


  • Look at it this way, did the CDC ever openly contradict Trump? They had private disagreements behind closed doors according to a lot of anonymous media reporting, but since the CDC falls under the jurisdiction of HHS the civil service employees fall under the management of political appointees. In contrast, the Fed are a more independent agency designed to be more insulated from politicians and they had no trouble publicly saying no to a president.

    I feel like people didn’t learn about this in school or remember it, so let me give a brief summary. Government agencies are staffed from the bottom up by civil service employees. They are hired and promoted based on their technical competence and expertise and can offer expert opinion and manage regulations. They are apolitical and keep their jobs in between presidential administrations. The very top and highest level jobs are politically appointed jobs by the White House and they change when administrations change. Their job is to set the policies for their respective departments and carry them out in accordance with the president’s wishes. If you’d like another example, the civil servants at the department of labor compile statistics on employment and unemployment rates and the president’s Secretary of Labor manages the department at the top and helps set departmental agenda.

    My point is that the departments and agencies are not purely independent bodies and by design they are under the control of politicians. We have accountability by both electing a president who controls the staffing and high level decisions and Congress who oversees the functioning and results of each agency. I never said all presidents were equal on this but each one has a lot of control over what each agency PUBLICLY says. Biden essentially controls what ICE or CIA says to the press even if they privately warn him about changes in migrant numbers or WMD programs abroad.