I’m old enough to remember when 24 hours ago the Biden administration said that a ground assault in Rafah would be crossing its red line. It’s pretty easy to remember because that was about 48 hours after the Biden administration said that just ‘going in’ to Rafah would be crossing its red line.

Imagine how much SpaceX could learn if they blow up a crewed starship.

• Musk toadie (probably)

“and about just as many view it as a belief in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (72%),”

This, right here, is a big part of the problem. The notion of an ethnostate is antithetical to a democracy. You cannot be both. It’s definitionally impossible. A state practicing some of the mechanics of democracy does not make it a democracy. If the supremacy of one ethnic cohort is a fundamental tenet of your state, there is no amount of ‘liberalism’ or rhetoric that will turn you into a democracy. If you are part of this 72%, I implore you to examine the cognitive dissonance you are practicing. I strongly suspect that many of this 72% have not critically examined the fallacy of people’s claims of Israeli democracy. Of those that have, I suspect that many are intentionally misrepresenting the situation since afterall, actively supporting a violently oppressive ethnostate isn’t a great look.

Edit: spelling

Unless I see the Biden administration take meaningful action against Israel, I’m not going to believe a goddamn thing they posture about, be it official statements or leaked messaging to the press. They have made it perfectly clear that they are actively and enthusiastically supportive of Israel’s policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Israel is a fascist ethnostate, built on a meticulously cultivated culture of racism. As an entity, they are entirely undeserving of our support or respect, and their uncritical supporters should be called out for their toxic malevolence at every opportunity. I’m so tired of this.

No, we should act to prevent them from doing this. Instead of bombing (and risking further spread and escalation) why not remove their motivation for doing this? What is their motivation for doing this? Their motivation is to prevent Israel from genociding. Now, if we just prevent Israel from genociding, the boats flow, Palestinians don’t get murdered, people in Yemen don’t get bombed either, and we make escalation less likely. That sounds like a far better outcome to me. The only reason to opt for the more violent path, is that you actually want the violence. If that’s your goal, then you’re the bad guy.

Why not, um, just restrain Israel instead? Because we Americans value dead Palestinians more than we fear inflation.

You do realize that there’s another way to make them stop doing it, don’t you?. That other way also has the side effect of murdering significantly fewer innocent Palestinians. It would also act to prevent the conflict from spreading regionally.

I realize that retraining Israel would deny us Americans our dead brown people high, but come on, think of all the inflation we could prevent by not killing them.

Turn Palestinian kids into dust…to keep prices down. Got it.

JFC. It’s almost like Biden is trying really hard to lose the election.

I’ve never been more excited to not buy a product in my life.

Honey, it ain’t you faith leading you there. It’s your racism. It always boils down to that one way or another in America.

Genocide.

Totally not a genocide at all.

Also, where is the report? This link takes you to a page that has a headline, a subheading that duplicates the headline, and body copy that duplicates the headline again. Am I missing something? Are outlets like ABC removing the content from their content these days?

Veritasium. After he put that uncritical commercial for the self driving car company on his feed I couldn’t take any of his content seriously anymore.

Ethan Klein and H3. Before the Israel stuff happened in October, the silliness was enjoyable because it seemed like the guy had an earnest, intellectual curiosity underneath it all.

All those resources available to them, and the biggest idea they’ve come up with in the better part of a decade is that dumb face computer.

Hans, are we the baddies?

I understand this logic and I’ve made this argument in the past. As time goes on, however, I’m coming to the understanding that the major thing the UN actually provides is deniability. It creates an aura of accountability without actually accomplishing it. The pageantry of rhetoric around the UN’s mission would have us believe that merely shining light on the wrongdoing of powerful nations will lead to some kind of justice. It never does. It actually breeds complacency in the same way that ranting about politics online does. You feel like you are changing something, but you aren’t. I think we need something like the UN, but the UN as currently constructed is fatally flawed and may be making things actively worse in some important ways.

I 100% expect that such warnings will motivate the US to further reign in freedoms and discriminate against specific ethnic groups rather that spark any meaningful introspection about the policies that are the fundamental cause of such threats.