UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Arming The Moderate Rebels was, incidentally, how Hamas formed in opposition to the Palestinian Authority two decades ago. Then they became the excuse Israel needed to do genocide at the border.

Cannot be overemphasized that the average age of Palestinians is eighteen. These are children being bombed, caged tortured, displaced, starved, and then armed to turn against one another.

In another ten years, we're going to get another whole fascist line about how Palestinians are feral soulless savages. Textbooks will be written to teach future Israelis how Arabs lack humanity, with the remnants of Palestinian society used as the proof.

the IAEA’s entire purpose is non-proliferation of nuclear weapons

Oh? How many inspections have they made in Israel?

Sorry, I will not feel pity towards the Iranian government.

Of course not. Your brain is poisoned by hate.

I couldn't name anyone I knew who actually went through the shit of Vietnam and wore one of those hats proudly.

They were exclusively for the ranks of the Texas Air National Guard, the straight up draft dodgers who wanted to look cool with their chud friends, and the handful of sociopaths who thought burning down people's homes was cool.

What I’m arguing is that you said this was all to prevent Iran to have nuclear energy, which is untrue since Iran already has that.

They have a single nuclear plant that had been under construction since 1975 and was held up repeatedly by foreign intervention, including the 2009 sabotage effort by the Obama administration's CIA - which, incidentally, gave the rest of the world exposure to the Stuxnet virus as collateral. Then there has been the persistent effort by US and Israeli intelligence services to kidnap and assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, also going back decades. Not even including the assassination efforts since 2021, we've seen attacks in 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 all linked back to western aligned governments.

"Iran has a single nuclear power plant so what are you complaining about?" is deliberately naive and obtuse, particularly when peer nations like Germany and France have enjoyed the benefits of between six and fifty-six plants going back over 40 years. Hell, the UAE has four active plants and over 5x Iran's total energy capacity for a population 1/10th the size, without provoking the kind of intervention and assault the Iranians have endured.

The latest bombing of uranium enrichment facilities - hell, the fact that they need to bury their refinement facilities at the bottom of a mountain to begin with - illustrate the undo costs and constant threats Iranians need to endure in order to modernize their electric grids.

I do not agree they should be outright attacked over such things, but to pretend like Iran is completely innocent is ridiculous.

Innocent of what? Implementing energy modernization strategies that have been in the works since prior to the revolution?

What are you even accusing them of? Not adhering to an arms control agreement the US pulled out of as an excuse to attack them? It's insane to even talk about the Iranian nuclear program absent the malicious history of foreign intervention.

I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don't think its bad on its face.

But they've invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don't need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn't work.

Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can't the mainline games deliver this level of quality?

Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.

But you got to be a goddamn moron to be impressed by the current president.

The joke of American politics is that you'll have two candidates run by smearing each other into the dirt. One of them will squeak out a win and get a few months of being The Most Charismatic Person On Earth because of a marginal victory largely on EC winner-take-all. But the TV/Radio will say this person is INCREDIBLY POPULAR and people will be brow-beaten into believing it.

Then that person will actually attempt to govern, fumble the ball for a while, and watch the media turn on them. Popularity will plummet and the opposition will come out of the woodwork insisting "Our Guy Would Have Been Better". Except its a media cycle driven by incompetency and corruption at the elected level. It's inevitably a false choice, because everyone on the ballot was one flavor of corporate shill or another from the get-go.

By the end, all you have left is an argument over who would have been worse. Everyone calls everyone else a moron for thinking the wrong things. Nobody seems capable of identifying quality leadership, because quality leaders don't have an in with corporate media to inflate their celebrity profiles.

It's cargo cults all the way down.

The nut of it. Trump wants to be able to parade around DC and say he Ended The War With Iran.

If Israel keeps bombing Iran, it makes Donald Trump look bad. They're obstructing his victory lap and getting in the way of a bunch of cable news networks posting "Mission Accomplished" over his face.

It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.

Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you've got a position on cosmetic surgery... Everything's a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.

Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.

The spectacle is more important than the consequences.

So wtf are you talking about?

Nuclear power is very different from nuclear weapons.

And the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported that Iran was not complying with their inspectors on numerous occasions

This was the same manufactured story that the US used to invade Iraq. Cherry picking disputes between the IAEA and the Iranian energy ministry to justify a massacre of civilian scientists and civilians caught in the crossfire? Why are Americans so ready to throw away the lives of every other global citizen?

your story is just completely made up

The crusade by Netanyahu to provoke an invasion and massacre of Iranians is exhaustively well-documented. The US-lead effort to sanction Iran and cripple its economy, following the '79 revolution is exhaustively well-documented. From the Project For The New American Century, championed by Neocon wunderkind Bill Kristol to the Project 2025 authored by JD Vance, the goal of crippling Iran's economy and fomenting revolution domestically as a prelude to invasion has been laid out in excruciating detail.

Almost as though the Iranians built a bunker deep inside a mountain for this exact contingency.

And why does it have zero chance?

Gerrymandering in the House and vote caging in the Senate, combined with a media that's the mouthpiece of genocidal billionaires, guarantee Republicans a permanent advantage in Congress no matter how unpopular their leadership becomes.

Imagine all Democrats stood together on this and they could get a few Reps over.

Hardly have to image. That's exactly what occurred in 2019 and 2021. All the Republicans who defected got primaried out and replaced with MAGAts. Dems who played footsie with your Liz Cheneys and Jeff Flakes ended up poisoning their own electoral campaigns and losing supporters. The horse trading between centrist Dems and Repubs backfired colossally, as the legislature could only do shit people hated, while Nancy and Chuck whined about needing bipartisanship to Beat Trump.

Then Biden took office, Merrick Garland refused to press charges of any sort, and Trump scampered off Scott free to run again in four years.

Shit is improving, quickly even.

On what planet?

the mission failed to do more than set Iran back a few months

Iran. Doesn't. Have. A. Nuclear. Weapons. Program.

They have repeatedly presented evidence to this effect to multiple watchdog groups. They have had over 30 years to build a bomb and have declined to do so. The idea that this "set Iran back" is predicated on the theory that they were ever engaged in a project to build a weapon like this.

The dirty truth of the matter is that Israel does not want Iran to access clean, cheap, highly efficient nuclear power for purely economic reasons. They don't want an Iranian industrial revolution that might put the country on par with Germany or Japan or Brazil or China. Keeping the Iranians trapped in the 1930s, technologically, is a part of a broader effort to strangle the Middle East (and Africa and the South Pacific states) and keep them yoked to the post-industrial Western economy as a source of cheap materials and cheap labor.

Why the hell would anyone feel any need to harass someone like this?

For one, there's good money in it.

Black Cube's tactics have resulted in a number of international controversies. In Canada, the firm was criticized by an Ontario Court for an attempt that aimed to discredit a judge by trying to get him to make antisemitic comments in secretly recorded meetings. In Romania, two of its employees were convicted of criminal charges involving harassment and hacking. The firm also drew condemnation for covertly surveilling and assisting efforts to discredit women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual violence and the investigative journalists researching whether those accusations were credible. Their tactics also involve attempts to goad individuals into making anti-semitic or otherwise damaging remarks.

Weird how someone who became a minor celebrity opposing the lucrative live fur industry would be targeted and harassed to death.

I hope this isn't some kind of pattern, wherein public figures who speak out in defense of environmental and social welfare causes are defamed and driven into obscurity or death.

I wish that were true, but I've got a stack of home movies that say differently.

HitlerPig cheated, and we all know it.

Nixon accused JFK of buying votes all through Illinois after the 1960 election. And we have ample statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest the Dem machine in Chicago was absolutely stacking the deck in JFK's favor. But we also have ample statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest the GOP machine was stacking the deck in the south of the state.

Subsequently, when Nixon recaptured the executive branch in '68 (following a series of very convenient political upheavals) he implemented the "Southern Strategy" to win over Dixiecrat leadership and cement a Republican majority across the Gulf Coast for the next 80 years. The same Democrats who had been winning elections on the back of that machine in the 60s/70s became Republicans winning with the same machine at their backs in the 80s/90s.

This isn't a problem unique to Trump. It's baked into the decentralized, county-lead, deliberately opaque and byzantine electoral counting and reporting system. Katherine Harris was fucking with Florida elections in 2000 the same way Brad Raffensperger fucked with Georgia elections in 2024.

And don't look too hard at California's ascendancy of Silicon Valley shills or the cop-lead effort to elevate Eric Adams to the NYC Mayorship or the Richie Torries seat in the Bronx or the current ratfvckery with Cuomo.

You won’t be torn anymore.

I've seen bits of it and heard some of the highnotes covered in other media. I think one of the producers was on the TrashFuture podcast at one point... or another one I listen to.

Either way, the Russia/China/North Korea/Insert-Evil-Foreigner-Here (but never Israel or Saudi Arabia or Qatar, because we're friends and they would never dream of...) angle was overhyped, while the degree to which local county clerks and judges fuck with this was under reported.

To believe that extremely powerful forces have NOT been trying to control our elections for years, is extremely naive.

Election manipulation, particularly domestically, is a very touchy subject. It's been proven to depress voter turnout in the receptive demographic. So you're stuck with this dilemma of trying to alert people to manipulation without deterring them from turning out in the next cycle. The line that both liberals and conservatives throw out is "We have to vote in such huge numbers that they can't cheat us!" which can be an effective rallying cry in the moment. But it doesn't work if you don't ever do anything to address the claims down the line.

Even when Obama's campaign swept the Atlantic Coast in 2008, what did his DOJ do to confront all the Bush-era fuckery thereafter? Same with Trump in 2016, screaming "Lock her up!" at Hillary while insisting she's rigged the whole vote, then... just shrugging and ignoring her while in office. Really kicks the legs out of your base when you spend a year complaining about how inherently unfair the election process has become and then announcing "We won so I guess everything is fine".

Confirming that arrests have been made.

Very easy for police to grab random people out of a music festival and throw them in jail.

These social panic stories, in which unnamed sources make nonfalsifiable claims that result in some number of uninvestigated allegations and a series of possibly unrelated arrests stinks of Satanic Panic or Razorblades In the Halloween Candy or Haitian Immigrants are Eating Our Dogs, or any number of other news stories built on gossip.