Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He's a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.
He's never been "savvy", he's just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.
The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.
I'm surprised that they're still going, but Russia has shown the world that they're a third rate military, at best.
As to Palestine. It doesn't matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they're Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they're religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.
And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it's all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.
This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.
I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.
Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he's a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It's the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn't.
As to Palestinian resistance. I don't think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.
An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.
From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I'm not sure how to fight that... I don't think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.
It didn't work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet... Likely not though.
Yeah, while there are dozens or possibly hundreds of flavors of "wicca". The first tenent is almost always some variation on "do no harm". Normally phrased something like "as it harms none, do as thou will"... Which is odd phrasing for something written in the last century.
The main exception is those who follow Crowley. His whole deal was "do what thou will shall be the whole of the law".
Crowley was mostly in it for the shock value.
And again, Crowley's "ancient wisdom" is newer than the invention of photography. We even have recordings of him speaking.
As anyone who has lived in a Rocky Mountain town can say, Distant bullies are pretty bad too.
But that's a sort of unique situation. Or it was until Reagan. See, the entire Rocky Mountain range is treated as a sort of internal colony.
Resources are extracted, but the people who own the companies doing the extraction all pretty much live on one of the coasts.
And then every store is also owned by someone who lives on one of the coasts.
This means that any real wealth produced in those states, quickly leaves those states.
A lot of towns in the area never really had a "down town" in the first place, and with the creation of Walmart and such, no one else gets a downtown either.
The answer of course is a bigger government. But it has to be free of corporate influence.
Which might just take a very big government. Like expanding the House and Supreme Court big.
It actually is thanks to the permanent apportionment act of 1929.
The size of Congress needs to increase with the increase in population. But it's been fixed at 435 for over 100 years even as the population has more than tripled and we've added two states.
Kaplan was a Bush toadie who participated in the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the recount in Florida in 2000 letting the corrupt jackasses on the Supreme Court to steal the election for Bush.
Kaplan has personally exempted right wing "news" sources from Facebook's truthfulness standards.
Eight years in and I'm still pissed about those fucking hats. I have this nice red cap that a friend gave me almost 15 years ago. It was custom-made, and has a starburst image that a third friend created... and the cap base is the exact same shade of red as those fucking Trump hats, so I've not been able to wear it in public for 8 years.
There were actually several zionist military groups. The Irgun, the Haganah, and the worst of the bunch, the Lehi.
And they did more than bomb a single hotel. They were a bunch of evil assholes who massacred villages, which is what started the first Arab-Israeli war.
The Lehi hated the British so much that they repeatedly tried to join the Nazis in WW2. The death camps were common knowledge among Jews who escaped Germany, and yet, the leaders of Lehi still wanted to join Hitler in fighting the British. They also really liked the Nazi writings about wiping out "inferior races" but decided that since they were "god's chosen" they swap the races around a bit and put Arabs at the bottom.
And in 1980, the surviving members all got medals issued to them by the IDF for their role in helping to found Israel. Issued by the surviving (second) leader, who was the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, and was Netanyahu's political mentor.
Don't get me started on Ordinal vs Cardinal voting systems... But the TLDR is that Ordinal is great when you have two options, and shit when you have more than that.
STAR is the best voting system I've found so far. (Still looking for better, but STAR is pretty good)
Did you know that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist? Seriously. He was a terrorist leader. He co-founded uMkhonto weSizwe. A anti-apartheid terrorist organization.
And the IRA. Terrorists that lived their car bombs.
The US military has explicitly used terrorist tactics in war.
As for Hezbollah... They were founded when Israel invaded Lebanon to act as a resistance force. Since Israel still holds Lebanese territory Hezbollah still has a reason to exist.
It also doesn't help that the IDF has been launching air strikes and assassinations in neighboring countries since the 50s...
Which really makes the IDF the true terrorist organization here.
The war in Afghanistan was lost the moment Bush switched gears to invade Iraq.
He pulled resources out that never went back, and then Obama did the same to fight ISIL. And then Trump pulled even more out just because.
As the years went on, more of the security was offloaded to a corrupt interm government that never quite managed to become self sufficient.
When Trump did his pull out, he got Congress to pull funding. That funding was all that wa keeping the Afghani military going.
Then Biden had to finish the pull out, and he did not stick the landing.
Also bonus fun fact. The Taliban is very likely going to start the world's first Water War. They've been damming and diverting rivers that their neighbors rely on.
There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/3/24/22982864/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-brian-klaas
Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle
Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He's a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.
He's never been "savvy", he's just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.
The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.
I'm surprised that they're still going, but Russia has shown the world that they're a third rate military, at best.
As to Palestine. It doesn't matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they're Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they're religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.
And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it's all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.
I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.