"Over the last 13 months of Israel’s genocide, they have displaced 1.9 million Palestinians—about 90% of Gaza’s population. Israel has also destroyed the majority of civilian infrastructue in Gaza, violating their obligation to ensure civilians can return to their homes.

Trifecta: The dust has settled and Republicans won control of the US House with 218 seats. Combined with the Republican’s victory of the Senate, the Republicans have achieved a 'trifecta.' This certainly gives Trump a lot of power, and the man is desperate to wield it in his own uniquely horrific way."

with a GIANT Hat Tip
to those (on these pages!) ad-
vocating for Israel's Slaughter of
their Entrapped populace, their Starvation
mutilation, deprivation, decimation and damnation

y'all did Well
and bibi and el-
fuckingtrumpfster'll
have a little Surprise for
You in your Xmas stockings.

good
luck.

"Amidst his nomination,
Gaetz resigned from his post in
Congress, thus cancelling any investigations."

if "Republicans" can
swallow Gaetz, they can
Swallow ANYTHING. but, if they Cannot,
then they just lost a (most Disgusting) member.

one down;
217 to go.

@1: So, you guys are saying Hamas should NOT have used civilians and their infrastructure in Gaza as shields against the IDF, after Hamas kidnapped civilians out of Israel? Hamas should especially have NOT done everything it could to increase the civilian casualty rate, too, I'm guessing?

Because if that's what you're saying, I agree 100%.

boy oh boy
it's Hard to get in
a word edgewise here

but smokin' Joe
could Resign, hand
the reins over to Kamala
and she Does What's Necessary

having an Article II
and All that
Entails.

Considering CNN and other news outlets had a hard time finding a single Republican that had anything nice or remotely complimentary to say about Gaetz's nomination, I hold on to a sliver of hope that Congress isn't stupid enough to confirm a man not only under ethics investigation and accused of trafficking minors, but also one only spent two years actually practicing law before he ran for state rep.

@3 crazy that these "Human Rights Watch" characters decided to wade into preeminent international law expert tensorna's domain.

@6: lol, even the founder of Human Rights Watch says not to trust Human Rights Watch when it comes to Israel.

There's a nice economic analogy in the communist pizza potluck in having more than just one pie to divide.

All I can say is that these confirmation hearings are going to be some kick ass TV!

@9 They're skipping them altogether. Congress will collude with Trump to skip the hearings and they'll be recess appointments.

At this point no one should need a human rights organization to know that the assault on Gaza isn’t ending until the entire strip has been cleansed of Palestinians and the hostages are all dead.

@6: No one doubts the situation in Gaza has been anything other than a humanitarian disaster. The issue is the Stranger, supportive commenters here, and some persons in the wider world, who have relentlessly overstated the case, assuming it’s all Israeli war crimes and human rights violations, and flat-out ignoring how leaders in Hamas wanted it this way.

@7 no he was upset HRW criticized Israel because it's an "open society" and he felt they should focus on "closed societies." But as it turns out, believe it or not, democratic governments can also commit war crimes.

@11: lol, “cleansed of Palestinians.” No one from Gaza is going anywhere. Come back here in a year and admit you were wrong.

If you want to see just how unhinged the anti Israel crowd is nowadays search up responses to Netflix's promotion of their new movie about Mary. The pro Palestinian crowd is melting down that an Israeli actress was chosen to portray Mary who in their minds was a Palestinian woman. The lengths that these people will go to erase Jews from history continues to confound and amaze me.

@15: Ha ha, one of our commenters here, Average Bob, periodically pops up to deny entire millennia of Jewish history in Israel. The erasure of Jews from history is a cornerstone of Palestinian advocacy.

Huge swaths of Gaza have already been rendered uninhabitable for decades, in addition to the tens of thousands already dead and countless more indefinitely displaced. They’re not stopping until they have purged as many Palestinians from inside Israel’s borders the world will allow them to get away with.

UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war

14 November 2024
NEW YORK (14 November 2024) – Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices* said in a new report released today.

“Since the beginning of the war, Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life — food, water, and fuel,” the Committee said. “These statements along with the systematic and unlawful interference of humanitarian aid make clear Israel’s intent to instrumentalise life-saving supplies for political and military gains.”

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent-genocide

You gotta tax the capital, not the gains. Let them have the gains. Taxing income is stupid, anyway. Tax the capital itself. The more idle, the more passive, the higher the tax. People who make their living by a wage or salary shouldn’t be taxed on their income, anyway.

Not all trifectas are created equal. The Senate is way more Trump-y than it was in 2017, when John McCain, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse (and probably others who have now departed) provided at least a little Republican resistance to the human pile of garbage that was president.

@16 Pathetic liar. I never denied the continued presence of Palestinian Jews

@19: At what point/date do you determine the "capital" price of a stock to tax?

@17: “They’re not stopping until they have purged as many Palestinians from inside Israel’s borders the world will allow”

Wait, what, Gaza is inside Israel’s borders?! Do you mean the long-awaited one-state solution has finally arrived!! 🤣🤣🤣

Kidding! Meanwhile, over here in reality, no one has been “purged” from Gaza. The Gazans don’t want to leave, and no other state wants to accept them. Some Gazans with foreign passports have left (as is their right), and some Gazans with specific medical needs have left for treatment, but there is no purge of the Gazan people. The civilian deaths in Gaza are a tragedy, but they are a normal and lawful consequence of the militias’ failure to disentangle themselves from the civilian population. The internal displacements are also sad, but they, too, are a result of the militias’ decision to fight within populated areas.

If you, like me, genuinely care about the well-being of Palestinians, then you should root for the permanent destruction of the militias. They are a cancer on the precious body of Palestine.

@20: lol, you’ve always been willing to tolerate Jewish “presence.” What you can’t abide is Jewish nationhood. 😁

I love seeing those Blue Sky embeds on SLOG instead of X/Twitter ones. I know it seems like a small thing, but as soon as media companies stop giving Musk traffic, the better we all will be in the long run.

The belief that all you have to do is simply kill Hamas to end the conflict is the same kind of magical thinking that led the US into the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq. You cannot break the cycle of violence with more violence. You are only minting the next generation of terrorists.

I don’t claim to have the solution but I can see with my own eyes what has been taking place over the last 13 months. The Netanyahu regime is actively thwarting hostage negotiations because they are far more valuable to his project captive or dead. They give him the pretext to continue killing and displacing Palestinians with enough plausible deniability to argue he is not committing crimes against humanity.

Personally I do not need Netanyahu’s actions rise to the level of war crimes to be appalled by them. The goal should be to stop before reaching the technical definition of genocide, not accurately describing it after the fact.

@25: You absolutely can break the cycle of violence with more violence. In fact, in a dangerous neighborhood like the Middle East, it’s often the only way you can. Israel’s neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, didn’t make peace with Israel because they suddenly woke up one morning feeling philo-semitic. They made peace because they lost war after war after war to the Israeli army. The same goes for the PLO: no peace until after Israel handed their asses to them on multiple occasions. Even your example of Iraq shows what war can accomplish. Saddam? Dead. Islamic State? Dead. These bad actors didn’t go away on their own; they went away because we and our Iraqi allies killed them.

That’s not to say every war succeeds. Your example of Afghanistan represents a prominent failure of war to achieve its objectives. And Israel has lost a war to Hizbollah before and may yet do so again this time (although initial returns have been highly encouraging). Nothing is ever guaranteed, but to argue that war never works is contrary to the historical record.

@20 I guess that would be hard since there is no such thing as a "Palestinian Jew". Jews are from Judea.

Thanks Hannah for making the leap to Bluesky (as a previous poster pointed out, now is the time to break our addiction to zombie twitter - it is not unique tech, it is own by a POS, it is littered with vile people).

@27: lol, no such thing as a “Palestinian” of any description until the early 20th century. But sshhh, it’s not polite! They’ve got the name now, so they, too, deserve a state.

When is CM Morales going to do something - anything, if it’s just mouthing platitudes and cliches - about the crime and homelessness in her district? Is there a stronger Tanya Woo who can emerge from the ID and take her on?

The dissolution of Infowars’ assets and the death of Alex Jones would be even more like justice. .

@20: “ I never denied the continued presence of Palestinian Jews.”

No, you just keep manufacturing reasons why they should be considered either irrelevant, or an affront to the Palestinian Arabs, who you clearly regard as the one true rightful rulers of that land. Hence, you wound up using the results from two millennia (!) of imperial discriminations against Jews in what had been (and now again is) Israel, as part of your claim they alone have no inherent right to be there.

Palestine has existed since Roman times. Don't be historically illiterate.

@23 I disagree with colonizers taking Palestine away from a majority Arab population to create a Jewish ethnostate. To boot it puts me on the right side of history especially compared to racists like you who don't even acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians.

@26 "You absolutely can break the cycle of violence with more violence. "
Doubling down on stupid today are we Trumpus?
You're channeling Tucker Carlson with that gem.
And you're supposed to wait until they disagree with your pro ethnic cleansing viewpoints before you call them jew haters. Doing it beforehand makes you look like a zealot. Didn't you read the how to slander non supporters rule book?

@20 Mary was not a Palestinian Jew, she was a subject of Roman Judea who lived 15 centuries before the Byzantine Empire fell and there was even the beginnings of some concept of a Palestinian state or political entity as a vassal of the Ottomans. Before that it was only ever used to refer to a tract of land the way we would refer to the Midwest or Appalachia today.

@32 Arabs have occupied the Palestine region for as long as 3700 years BC and were an overwhelming majority (~90%) at the beginning of the 20th century. You should learn a little history instead of continually spewing colonizer propaganda.

@35 ???? I never talked about Mary so I obviously couldn't have claimed that she was a Palestinian Jew even if she lived in a region called Palestine by the Romans.

@34: Sunlight is the best disinfectant for Jew-hatred, sorry if you feel burned, ha ha!

@36: Arabs in Palestine since 3700 BC, huh Average Bob? Even for a Wikipedia scholar like yourself, this is a pretty big gaff! 😂😂😂

I see the discussion continues between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front. Maybe with a few Popular Front splitters in there for good measure.

"I love Twitter too much..." I guess that finally explains why Slog is just a bunch of Twatter links most days. You do realize, Hannah, who owns Titter- one of the most vile and obnoxous people on the planet, so much so that even Chump is now tiring of him? And that it's mostly a platform now for White Nationalists and worse? And how it destroyed everbody's ability to comprehend and digest long form pieces or even anything that is longer than a couple of sentences? The more people link to that site and quote it- even cheeky left wing publications like this one- the more air he and his vile platform gets. I'll be back, The Stranger, when Skitter finally shuts down for good.

The IDF has a standard practice of sending in Palestinian prisoners into dangerous areas as literal human shields. This widespread practice is so common it is known as "mosquito protocol." This is a well documented war crime and practice that includes sending in children to trip booby traps or take gunfire before IDF soldiers enter conflict zones.

As with everything tensor says, the practice of using human shields by design is a projection. If you cannot hold yourself and the outgroup to the same standards, you are merely enabling the practice for the ingroup while scapegoating the outgroup. Tensor once again excused genocide on the basis of every civilian killed by a 2,000 bomb with a 10 sq mi kill range as a human shield.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-human-shields-israel-military-gaza-intl/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/14/israeli-forces-in-gaza-use-civilians-as-human-shields-against-possible-booby-traps

As if 70% women and children casualties could have a Hamas fighter just waiting to be blown up to make a point. Tensor has lost all credibility on this issue and believes like Mike Huckabee that Palestinians don't even exist. Ahab is nihilist shithead. And thumpus is a troll by desigb whose only point is to accuse the opposition of antisemitism by projecting their own.

We just elected the most antisemitic government ever and the only thing these trolls can do is accuse Progressives of antisemitism by demanding adherrence to international law. These people are the lowest common denominator of humanity and have forfeited their very souls by enabling the worst suffering of innocent children of our lifetimes to keep criminal fascists out of prison.

The West Bank is next. There can be no justification for this. You all don't deserve to have children. Hopefully you won't live to see the death of your own.

@26 "You absolutely can break the cycle of violence with more violence."

Yes, for example if the US stopped supporting Israel the rest of the region would wipe them off the map, problem solved. Tough talk is all well and good when you're confident your team is on top and won't be the ones to suffer. And you entirely lack human empathy.

The tribes of Judea and Israel were in competition from the time of Solomon. None of you dipshits grasp the greater context of history. It is one conquest after the next. Get the fuck off my land since my people were here first as I am a First Nations individual. Oh wait, so you don't like that? I guess you don't give a fuck about the right of return after all and nativism as long as you have bombs and guns and guns and bombs, you braindeas zombie fucks. Go fuck yourselves with a cactus you shitbags.

WTF is WRONG with this benighted country, massively stupefied by willful pro-Trumpist misinformation?
Social media is largely to blame for the demise of this once thriving democracy.
Attention, everybody who voted for Trump / Vance who ISN'T all of the following:
1.) Insanely wealthy with a net worth in the billions
2.)Corrupt as fuck
3.) White
4.) RepubliKKKan fascist
5.) Systematic racist
6.) Cruelly misogynist
7.) Right wing nut job
8.) cis male

The Orange Turd and its cronies are laughing at you for falling for their fear, loathing, and bullying tactics.
But there is karma. DJT's much gloated about "Trifecta Win" is going to bite it and its loyalists in the balls.
Hell is waiting for every bootlicking member of the Orange Turd's GOP.
Meanwhile, the poor, working class is going to feel it the worst when food, healthcare, and housing prices soar as a result of Project 2025. Matt Gaetz as Attorney General will be a national disaster.
Economist Paul Krugman warned us [See Op Ed. page A14, The Seattle Times, Wednesday, November 13, 2024, Why Trump's Deportations Will Drive Up Your Grocery Bill].

I feel just sick that Canada wants to follow the Orange Turd's totally fascist "Concept of a Plan".
Don't come bitching to me, MAGAs, when your rents or mortgages go up 500%, we're back to healthcare denial due to "pre-existing conditions", and it costs $50 for a loaf of bread.

@4 kristofarian: +1 We can only hope, kris.

@44: “if the US stopped supporting Israel the rest of the region would wipe them off the map”

Nah, from the Israeli point of view, US military aid is a convenience but hardly a necessity. If the US didn’t supply military aid (the money from which all flows back to US coffers), Israeli would buy, borrow, or seek grants from other suppliers. It would hurt the Israel, but they’ve done it before. Israel self-financed and self-armed throughout all of the major Arab wars up to the 1970s, and those were far more dangerous than the threats Israel faces today. It’s why Israel feels free to gaff off US presidents whenever they want: they don’t actually need us, lol!

@43: “every civilian killed by a 2,000 bomb with a 10 sq mi kill range”

Wow, that’s quite the performance you’re expecting out of a 2,000-pound bomb. Is it possible you have mistaken conventional bombs for nuclear bombs? 😂 No wonder you’re freaking out! 🤣🤣🤣

@48 I'd love to find out if you're right

@50: Careful what you wish for. If you think cutting off US aid would lead to a MORE restrained Israel, then you don’t much about US aid…or Israel 😄 We give them enough weapons that they don’t NEED to go for the jugular when they fight these little brush wars with the Arabs and Iranians.

@51 they're not fighting a "little brush war" they're committing ethnic cleansing, so I don't really see how they could be less restrained

@52: I’m as angry as you are that Hamas militiamen keep embedding themselves among the civilian population during the fighting. There really ought to be a law against it! 😃

I was inaccurate in my measurements, thanks thumpus.

A 2,000 lb. bomb blast radius is 800 meters in all directions from the point of impact, or approximately 2,010,619 square feet. That equals roughly 0.7 square miles, so considerably less than 10 which would be a nuke.

That being said, 85,000 of these things have been dropped on Gaza. If you need millions of feet to target a single terrorist, your concern isn't human shields but ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate collective punishment; aka genocide.

fxb.harvard.edu/2024/10/10/new-study-shows-israel-air-dropped-2000lb-bombs-within-lethal-and-damage-ranges-of-hospitals-in-gaza/

The IDF has dropped 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which is more than 7 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

@46- don’t know about anyone else but I’m looking forward to the assholes who thought the price of fucking eggs was more important than democracy losing their jobs. Maybe they’ll get tossed out of their houses too. I’m sure Trump will be the first to help them.

@54: Thanks, but I think you’re still off by almost two orders of magnitude. There’s no way a 2,000 bomb is reliably killing people “800 meters in all direction.” Maybe one or two people at that range by sheer bad luck, but the density of fragments just isn’t high enough to coat such a large circumference.

A more realistic appraisal of the expected lethal radius of a 2,000-pound bomb is about 120 meters. Not to say you’re perfectly safe beyond that distance, but you’d be more likely to survive than not.

A lethal radius of 120 meters gives a lethal area of about 45,239 square meters or about 0.017 square miles. That’s not, like, the wimpiest weapon on the battlefield, but it’s not some kind of slate-wiping science-fiction superweapon, either. You wouldn’t want one to land next door, but if one hit up the block, you would be just fine.

@55 it does nobody any good to be mad at the voters rather than the candidates. It's like getting mad at sports fans for booing the home team when they're playing like crap. If voters' primary concern was price of eggs Kamala should have focused on how she'd make them cheaper rather than stuff voters didn't care about.

"Saddam? Dead. Islamic State? Dead"

It'd be too funny if it weren't tragic when keyboard warriors would be experts like thumpus weren't dead serious that we are successful as long as we killed a few bad guys. First, Islamic State rose to preeminence and torched an entire region because we created the conditions for that to happen but who fucking cares about Arabs, certainly not thumpus. Second, never mind the 100,000s of dead Iraqi civilians and many more wounded, an entire region returned to the stone age and making enemies of almost all Arabs for the foreseeable future (and losing tons of global goodwill), the $8 trillion total cost that hopefully US taxpayers will never pay, because we got rid of a tinpot dictator that we previously supported for decades and de facto represented absolutely no threat to us or the international order.

@58: “an entire region returned to the stone age and making enemies of almost all Arabs for the foreseeable future.”

Wait, what? You think “almost all Arabs” are our enemies? You think there’s a region somewhere in the Middle East where people are living in the “Stone Age?” Ha ha ha ha! Even by your standards, this is cartoonish! 😂

@54, Name an alternative weapon that can reliably take out a subterranean and fortified combatant or military objective with less collateral damage.

There isn't one. That is why war is so awful.

75% of enemy casualties in war are obtained by artillery and bombs (aka indirect fires) Since WW I, every modern military on the planet trains their military to use intelligence to identify and target the opposition war fighters and supplies with indirect fires FIRST, to conserve the lives of one's own soldiers. As a last resort, send infantry forward so the opposition infantry must expose their positions by shooting, then have a Lieutenant or Sgt. in the group call in the indirect fire on identified sources of enemy fire. If there is civilian people and infrastructure nearby it becomes collateral damage.

The advancing soldiers often never see the soldiers firing on them from cover and concealment. They just identify the source if concealment and protection from which the fire comes, and call in the artillery or bombers to take it out. That is a death sentnece for non-combatants when Hamas and Hezbollah put their combatants and military assets under and around apartments and hospitals.

"The same goes for the PLO"

so why are you still fighting Hamas if beating back the PLO was such a decisive move?

"You absolutely can break the cycle of violence with more violence"

Not for permanent colonial conquests, unless you plan on killing/ethnic cleansing them all of course. You'd think that everybody would have learned the lessons of post ww2 colonial history but sadly not thumpus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2xQMR8Y_U

@61: “so why are you still fighting Hamas if beating back the PLO was such a decisive move?”

Well, I’m not fighting anybody, lol! But in hopes of clearing up your confusion: Hamas ≠ PLO. In fact, they routinely kill one another. 😁 The PLO even does so in collaboration with Israel nowadays, lol! 👍

But the PLO didn’t come to peace and collaboration willingly. They were beaten into it. Something similar will have to occur in Gaza if there is ever to be peace between Israel and Palestine. Some people just have to learn the hard way, that’s all. You of all people should understand a pigheaded commitment to wrongness, ha ha!

@60 it's so convenient for the IDF that every time they blow up a children's hospital they can just assert there was someone from Hamas in the vicinity and dimwits around the world eat it up

@59 Your attempts at deflecting from the gist of arguments by focusing on a turn of phrase or relatively minor facts, accompanied by a fake laugh at your own "jokes", like you have repeatedly done today is symptomatic of the intellectual poverty of your positions.

@63 Don't play dumb. The people who want to kill Israelis aren't in the PLO anymore, they are in Hamas, but they are fundamentally motivated by the same factors (apartheid, oppression, etc..). You displaced the problem but you haven't solved it, like killing 1000s of Hamas fighters won't solve it. Don't be a dunce, learn from history.

@65: “focusing on a turn of phrase or relatively minor facts”

Ha ha ha, they’re your words. If you think you’re stupid, you shouldn’t have said them! 😄

But all right, here you go: In addition to being wrong about “almost all Arabs” being our enemies, and being wrong about regions of the Middle East living in the “Stone Age,” you are also wrong about the financial cost of the Iraq War, the number of casualties of the Iraq War, the threat to the region and to America posed by Saddam Hussein, and the origins of the Islamic State. I don’t go point by point through your posts because you are just comprehensively wrong about anything having to do with the Middle East! All I can do is laugh! 😆

Remember when Tensorna and I had like 100 posts between us trying to get you to stop misreading ONE PARAGRAPH out of ONE COURT DECISION, and by the end of all that effort, you still could only dimly perceive that there might somehow be some sort of problem with your reading, although you still weren’t sure? Well everything in the Middle East is like that! You can’t expect Professor Thumpus to rescue you with that level of handholding every time you get something wrong…not when you keep getting so many, many things wrong! 😄😄😄

@66: Wait, are you poo-pooing the Oslo Accords? Ha ha ha, you really are a terrorism sympathizer aren’t you? 🤣

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6zovYEZs5g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y6BMNju1IA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Ag-LNWyFI

@59 "You think “almost all Arabs” are our enemies?"

Just to show how deluded you are:

"A survey that I conducted in six Arab countries in late February and early March [2003] found an unprecedented tide of public opinion running against the United States as American troops massed outside Iraq. Only 4 percent of respondents in Saudi Arabia, 6 percent in Jordan and Morocco, 10 percent in the united Arab Emirates, and 13 percent in Egypt expressed a favorable view of the United States. Even in Lebanon, where opinion was more positive, only 32 percent of respondents had a favorable view (see table 1)"
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/arab-public-opinion-on-the-united-states-and-iraq-postwar-prospects-for-changing-prewar-views/

Note that Lebanon has ~45% christians

@70: lol, so now those people are our “enemies?” Get outta here, man! 😂

@67 once a dunce, always a dunce but go ahead, keep laughing. Just make sure you wipe your chin once in a while.

@68 It figures that pointing out that nothing changed after Oslo amounts to being a terrorist sympathizer to you. There is virtually no daylight between your positioning on Palestine and that of Huckabee

@67 "Remember when Tensorna and I had like 100 posts between us trying to get you to stop misreading ONE PARAGRAPH out of ONE COURT DECISION"

How could I forget that you indeed spend days trying to gaslight your readers into believing that 'and' actually means 'or', and that most judges not mentioning the finding in their opinions that Israel was guilty of racial segregation AND apartheid actually implied that they didn't think that Israel wasn't guilty of racial segregation AND apartheid.

Great display of stupid partisan hackery from you both. Congrats.

@73: Ha ha ha don’t start that up again! I even took it on easy on you at the time! 😆 For example, I never dinged you for your repeated but erroneous characterization of the Court’s decision as an adjudication of “guilt.” But that’s yet another dead-end you’ve taken yourself down, just for your edification, lol!

@73 more silly posturing from you. Did you not pretend that 'and' meant 'or'? did you not claim that almost all judges disagreed with Israel being found GUILTY of racial segregation and apartheid when in fact only 2 explicitly disagreed with that part of the courts finding in their individual opinions?

Wipe your chin, moron

@65 -- ". . . deflecting from
the gist of arguments by focusing
on a turn of phrase or relatively minor facts... "

distractions soley
to divert our
Attention &
eat up our
Schlog
Time.

elthumbly is Worm-
tongue's Artificially
'intelligent' cha-
terbox ~ writ
smally

there's too much Overlap for separate
entities & two wormmys're
Three too many

@75: Ha ha ha! Oh the agony! I walked you through each and every judge’s opinion to explain why your reading was wrong, citing you specific paragraph numbers and doing the math for you on the vote count. At this point, you are not just ignorantly wrong but willfully wrong, ha ha ha!

At the time, I held off on raising the “guilt” issue since I knew you were certain to misunderstand that one, too. Sure enough, here you are! 😁 And in all-caps no less, ha ha ha! Nice one, Bob!

The smart-person explanation is that guilt or innocence is a question of law outside the jurisdiction of the ICJ, per Articles 34-38 and 65-68 of the Statute of the ICJ. If you’re looking for a guilty verdict, then you’re in the wrong court! But I know you’re unlikely to appreciate anything as technical as a jurisdictional question, so here’s a stupid-person explanation, which might be more likely to break through to you: Search the Court’s opinion for the word “guilt.” The magic word is not in there. 😄 Neither is “innocent” for that matter. You’re in the wrong court, Bob! 😃

So now that issue is out there, I can’t wait to find out how you’ll fuck THIS one up! 😂🤣😂🤣

I suggest that Slog have a daily Israel/Gaza thread where the people who want to obsess over it can do so in that post instead of hijacking the daily news posts.

@57 - well, inflation has been beaten back down. Wages are still rising. That happened on whose watch? Anyone? Beuhler? Voters had a choice between the woman who was VP at the time that the pandemic-caused inflation got fixed (of course, it's really the Fed rather than the Pres who fixes inflation) or a guy who was 110% promising to ignite inflation much more severe than what we just went through with his lunatic tariff scheme. And they chose the one who was going to start inflation up all over again. Because of the recent inflation that has already been dealt with. Genius.

Yes, Harris could have done a better job of messaging all this. But she knew better than to say the eggs were going to be cheaper, because no President could do that and deflation is actually really bad for an economy.

To be fair, I would bet that a large fraction of Trump voters could not define a tariff or what it would do to the economy. They just know that China bad something something China will pay for it blah blah blah. And they don't give a fuck whether they are voting for the end of American democracy or not. That is pretty sad.

One suspects that they might be motivated by something other than the price of eggs. Perhaps they kinda like Trump's racism.

I was fifteen when I followed the army
And forty when I returned.
I met a man from my own village
And asked him: whom will I find at home?
'Your house is that ruin over there,
overgrown and deserted.'
I found rabbits running in through a hole,
And pheasants were roosting in the roof.

@43: "As with everything tensor says, the practice of using human shields by design is a projection."
@64: "it's so convenient for the IDF that every time they blow up a children's hospital they can just assert there was someone from Hamas in the vicinity and dimwits around the world eat it up"

I'm neither "projecting," nor am I employed at NATO:

'Hamas, an Islamist militant group and the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, has been
using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007. According to the Statute of the International
Criminal Court (ICC), the war crime of using human shields encompasses “utilizing the presence of
a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from
military operations.” Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs
and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and
commercial areas.'

(https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf)

@54: " If you need millions of feet to target a single terrorist, your concern isn't human shields but ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate collective punishment; aka genocide."

Yeah, the IDF has been active for over thirteen months "to target a single terrorist." (Tell us you know nothing about this conflict, without directly telling us you know nothing about this conflict.) Hamas and Hezbollah (the latter in its illegal occupation of southern Lebanon) built hardened combatant infrastructure beneath civilian structures. This violates the Fourth Geneva Convention's absolute prohibition (referenced above) against using protected persons to shield combatants and/or their assets. So, if you actually cared anything at all about war crimes, you would long have been protesting these large chronic violations of international law by Hamas and Hezbollah. But you didn't, so no one need care what you say about war crimes by anyone else, either.

@78 Hi Kristo - Unfortunately, I think we likely have at least 2 bloodthirsty sociopaths on board.

@79 "And in all-caps no less"

I knew exactly what you meant you moron, which explains the all cap to taunt you, again, into showing how stupid you are. Who fucking cares whether or not the ICJ has actually the power to find Israel GUILTY as long as its findings translate into Israel being found GUILTY in the court of public opinion. Global public opinion is the main factor behind cratering the Israeli economy, which is the reason why Israel keeps furiously "catapulting the propaganda" But go ahead and keep trying to distract the peanut gallery with your deflections from the facts

@79 Earning power is still down 25% from before inflation. 60% live from paycheck to paycheck. Harris needed to say that she knew very well that 40+ years of pro-corporate, pro-economic elites policy had to be reversed, provide a strong pro-union blueprint showing what she was going to do, and that she needed the help of people to force that change. However, her DNC advisers told her that she couldn't say that and keep said elites on board her campaign. She and unfortunately we paid the price of Democratic party allegiance to corporate power.

If you don't want people to be captured by the scapegoating tactics of the racist rightwing, we need to have a compelling economic message (see above)

@82: lol, so when you say “guilty,” you don’t actually mean “guilty.” Got it! This also explains your “millions of lives lost” in Lebanon, your “8 trillion dollars” for the Iraq War, and your “genocide” in Gaza. It’s all just, like, “directionally true” for purposes of public persuasion! 😂🤣😂🤣

@83 No, when I say guilty, I mean guilty like any 2 bit moron can check in the dictionary except for you of course who famously claims that 'and' is a disjunction. Do I need to include the definition of 'guilty' as well to make you shut up? Geez, what a bothersome nitwit you are.

“millions of lives lost” in Lebanon,"

Actually it was millions of lives at risk , as you have been told already, which points to your blatant lying, again

“8 trillion dollars” for the Iraq War"

Error on my part it's 8 trillions for the war on terror (essentially Iraq and Afghanistan), including 3 to 6 trillions for Iraq alone. But do go on avoiding the meat of the argument with your continual deflection

"your “genocide” in Gaza"

It's not mine, it's yours to own for denying it, according to the united nations, the governments of many nations, most academic middle east experts, all human rights ngo's, etc ...

UN special committee likens Israeli policy in Gaza to genocide

Report also refers to Israel ‘using starvation as a weapon of war’ and running ‘apartheid system’ in West Bank

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/14/united-nations-special-committee-israel-gaza-genocide

@82: It’s fun, watching their masks slip:

“Who fucking cares whether or not the ICJ has actually the power to find Israel GUILTY as long as its findings translate into Israel being found GUILTY in the court of public opinion.”

Who cares what the court says, so long as we can have mob rule? Words mean whatever we want them to mean!

@79 not saying you're wrong, but if Biden/Harris actually in fact handled the economy well but STILL couldn't convince anyone of it that's even more embarrassing. It's like if a prosecutor had an actually guilty defendant but lost and wanted to blame the jury for being stupid. Maybe they were, but sir you had one job.

@44: "Yes, for example if the US stopped supporting Israel the rest of the region would wipe them off the map, problem solved."

The hard right wing of Likud thanks you, for confirming what the persons who demanded Harris impose an (illegal) "arms embargo" upon Israel really wanted.

You and Sawant do need to learn not to say the silent part out loud.

@55 dvs99: I dunno. This is a historically detrimental blow to our national economy as well as for healthcare, human rights, and governmental checks and balances. Draconian budget cuts are coming and everyone except the wealthy and corrupt is supposed to feel the pain, lick the GOP's fascist bootstraps, and like it.
I can't be happy right now. I just got diagnosed with Parkinson's and am NOT looking forward to RFK Jr. being in charge of the Health Department.