Politics & Stuff

[robsblubot 3,595]

5 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

None of them were viewed with equivalency to previous protests at the time, its only after the Military Industrial Complex have paid their shareholders that its looked at differently in the rear view mirror of history.

Its the basic human instinct of empathy for fellow human beings. Like I said you are either for against mass murder.

We are analyzing all of that in hindsight. Once again, in hindsight, I do not see equivalence because the US was not attacked by Vietnam; the same way Russia wasn't attacked by Ukraine. You may not think the attack by Hamas and the Israeli response are proportional, but that's exactly the nuance I was referring to.

Regarding teenagers/young adults,

"In the last decade, a growing body of longitudinal neuroimaging research has demonstrated that adolescence is a period of continued brain growth and change, challenging longstanding assumptions that the brain was largely finished maturing by puberty [1–3]. The frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying “executive functions” such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life [2]."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892678/#:~:text=The frontal lobes%2C home to,decade of life [2].

"It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet. The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so."
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051

I was actually reading a book about how the brain works and it described experiments done in the past on people who lost their frontal lobes due to accidents etc. It is very interesting how they completely changed their personalities depending on how severe the loss was.

Edited May 5, 2024 by robsblubot
grammar

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

4 hours ago, robsblubot said:

We are analyzing all of that in hindsight. Once again, in hindsight, I do not see equivalence because the US was not attacked by Vietnam; the same way Russia wasn't attacked by Ukraine. You may not think the attack by Hamas and the Israeli response are proportional, but that's exactly the nuance I was referring to.

Regarding teenagers/young adults,

"In the last decade, a growing body of longitudinal neuroimaging research has demonstrated that adolescence is a period of continued brain growth and change, challenging longstanding assumptions that the brain was largely finished maturing by puberty [1–3]. The frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying “executive functions” such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life [2]."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892678/#:~:text=The frontal lobes%2C home to,decade of life [2].

"It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet. The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so."
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051

I was actually reading a book about how the brain works and it described experiments done in the past on people who lost their frontal lobes due to accidents etc. It is very interesting how they completely changed their personalities depending on how severe the loss was.

Yes I knew all that when I worked with young people as a career advisor. Females actually develop quicker. 

Bottom line these protesters, the global protests, of which the Universities are a very small part, will be proved to be on the side of right. The genocidal racists, and their complicit silent cheerleaders, the 'journalists' that never question their corporate editors, the apologists for an illegal occupation will hide, and those that have them, will have to live with their consciences

 

[Fernando 6,585]

2 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Yes I knew all that when I worked with young people as a career advisor. Females actually develop quicker. 

Bottom line these protesters, the global protests, of which the Universities are a very small part, will be proved to be on the side of right. The genocidal racists, and their complicit silent cheerleaders, the 'journalists' that never question their corporate editors, the apologists for an illegal occupation will hide, and those that have them, will have to live with their consciences

 

This war would have long finish if Hamas cared for their people. 

They see their people dying and yet they don't surrender....

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

52 minutes ago, Fernando said:

This war would have long finish if Hamas cared for their people. 

They see their people dying and yet they don't surrender....

 

They, the Palestine leaders, and whoever supports them are the biggest oppressors in the region but it’s not fashionable to talk about them.

hamas knew exacrly what would happen after the attack. They were counting on it.

its funny because i’d describe the Palestine leaders who want the extinction of Israel and all its people very much textbook racist genocidal tyrants. 🤷‍♂️

Edited May 6, 2024 by robsblubot

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

This war would have long finish if Hamas cared for their people. 

They see their people dying and yet they don't surrender....

 

The Israelis would just carry on killing, they have said so. Would the jews surrender if they had 34 500 killed 73 000 wounded up to 120 000 buried under rubble... I think a war needs two armies. this is genocide.

96% of deaths before Oct 7th were Palestinians, mainly children

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

Dont forget Netanyahu was supporting and encouraging people to finance Hamas to divide the Palestinians from the PA. 

Hamas are idiots, but Israel with the best security in the World took 8,13 and 20 hours to respond to the incursion points.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

Robert de Niro ''Trump does not have one redeeming feature''

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin orders nuclear weapons drills

 

Russia testing nuclear weapons in response to West possibly sending troops to Ukraine

Russia’s tactical nuclear weapon drills are a response to statements from the West about sending troops to Ukraine, the Kremlin said on Monday.

Reuters

[Fernando 6,585]

3 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

The Israelis would just carry on killing, they have said so. Would the jews surrender if they had 34 500 killed 73 000 wounded up to 120 000 buried under rubble... I think a war needs two armies. this is genocide.

96% of deaths before Oct 7th were Palestinians, mainly children

And yet Hamas is still fighting and has captive. 

Like I said this war would have long finish if Hamas cared for their people. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

And yet Hamas is still fighting and has captive. 

Like I said this war would have long finish if Hamas cared for their people. 

Maybe -though Gantz has said the bombing will continue whether hostages are released or not. 

Israel has imprisoned 31 458 Palestinian children (Times of Israel) 880 since November. None are allowed to see their parents. Hostages also.

[robsblubot 3,595]

4 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Maybe -though Gantz has said the bombing will continue whether hostages are released or not. 

Israel has imprisoned 31 458 Palestinian children (Times of Israel) 880 since November. None are allowed to see their parents. Hostages also.

Yes, people do stupid shit when they are attacked. Countries do stupid shit when they are attacked. Some countries do stupid shit even when not being attacked and they even make up a reason to attack someone.
Bottom line is don't attack anyone because you don't know how they will react; it may be unjustified in your view, but they may feel "justified" which will likely be enough to do [said stupid shit].

----- 

On unrelated news from back home,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/06/weather-tracker-torrential-rainstorms-cause-death-and-destruction-in-brazil

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

2 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

Yes, people do stupid shit when they are attacked. Countries do stupid shit when they are attacked. Some countries do stupid shit even when not being attacked and they even make up a reason to attack someone.
Bottom line is don't attack anyone because you don't know how they will react; it may be unjustified in your view, but they may feel "justified" which will likely be enough to do [said stupid shit].

75 years of Occupation before Oct 7th millions displaced, tortured, imprisoned, maimed, killed, by the most hi tech weaponised sociopathic Israeli Attack Force, broken more UN resolutions than every other country put together, and protected by a compliant corporate media - yes that is a reason to do 'stupid shit'.

8 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

On unrelated news from back home,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/06/weather-tracker-torrential-rainstorms-cause-death-and-destruction-in-brazil

My friend has been working in Brazil - educational outreach to some of the remotest parts. They were teaching the kids about the Giant Armadillo and other local wildlife, which wasnt mentioned in their curriculum. They were taught about lions, gorillas, elephants etc but not about the indigenous wildlife - as they had a US based curriculum.

[robsblubot 3,595]

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

75 years of Occupation before Oct 7th millions displaced, tortured, imprisoned, maimed, killed, by the most hi tech weaponised sociopathic Israeli Attack Force, broken more UN resolutions than every other country put together, and protected by a compliant corporate media - yes that is a reason to do 'stupid shit'.

That's how you see the situation, I get that. I don't share your view, but in an exercise of empathy, I can see the how it may look from each side; hence why I think it's nuanced. Israel may also think "leave me the fuck alone" which has never really happened in 70+ years.
The point being, when you deal with different groups, countries, their world view matters even if you disagree/despise it. I personally see the world as a very unstable ecosystem.

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

My friend has been working in Brazil - educational outreach to some of the remotest parts. They were teaching the kids about the Giant Armadillo and other local wildlife, which wasnt mentioned in their curriculum. They were taught about lions, gorillas, elephants etc but not about the indigenous wildlife - as they had a US based curriculum.

yeah there no lions or elephants in Brazil. In the most populated areas of Brazil one can see a monkey at the zoo and that's about it. you really have to go to very remote areas to see any form of diverse wildlife: midwest (pantanal) or NW (amazon).

The city under water in the article is a 4-5m people region tho. Even the international airport is under water and shut down for the rest of the month. Only wildlife in the region is you drive south towards Uruguay and see capybaras all over.

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

2 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

yeah there no lions or elephants in Brazil. In the most populated areas of Brazil one can see a monkey at the zoo and that's about it. you really have to go to very remote areas to see any form of diverse wildlife: midwest (pantanal) or NW (amazon).

Yeah they had a US based curriculum teaching them about wildlife in Africa ! Ignoring the diverse stuff right on their doorstep. Crazy. Now the local kids are aware of the wildlife in their locality, and more importantly are taking pride in it.

 

4 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

The city under water in the article is a 4-5m people region tho. Even the international airport is under water and shut down for the rest of the month.

Terrible - did you see the similar thing in Dubai ? It was their own fault as a result of cloud seeding

 

5 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

Only wildlife in the region is you drive south towards Uruguay and see capybaras all over.

Theyre incredible - Worlds biggest rodent I believe

[robsblubot 3,595]

2 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Yeah they had a US based curriculum teaching them about wildlife in Africa ! Ignoring the diverse stuff right on their doorstep. Crazy. Now the local kids are aware of the wildlife in their locality, and more importantly are taking pride in it.

 

Terrible - did you see the similar thing in Dubai ? It was their own fault as a result of cloud seeding

 

Theyre incredible - Worlds biggest rodent I believe

Yeah saw that and the issue down in Porto Alegre is also man-made, more on the global scale. Southern Brazil was always the place where tropical and polar masses meet, but it's getting much worse with climate change. Meanwhile a historic draught in the Amazon forest https://eos.org/articles/almost-a-year-in-drought-in-the-amazon-is-far-from-over

Capybaras are amazing! and there are so many in the meadows there. On the other hand, it's interesting in the first hours or so, it takes several hours in a straight line to get to the Uruguayan border, so the danger there is falling asleep at the wheel.

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

1 hour ago, robsblubot said:

Meanwhile a historic draught in the Amazon forest https://eos.org/articles/almost-a-year-in-drought-in-the-amazon-is-far-from-over

Blimey 39 degrees water temperature ! 250 river dolphins killed, tragic -already endangered. Still there are climate change deniers out there.....

[robsblubot 3,595]

5 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Blimey 39 degrees water temperature ! 250 river dolphins killed, tragic -already endangered. Still there are climate change deniers out there.....

heh I think fewer by the year. Never understood what was so mysterious about how we completely disrupt the carbon cycle... 🤷‍♂️
thought the hint was in the name, "fossil" fuels.

I read that by now it's just too late, and impractical, to tackle the issue by reducing the carbon footprint. The solution will have to come from tech or we will just have to adapt to the new norm... perhaps both.

[Vesper 30,224]

Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict?

It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.

https://prospect.org/world/2024-05-06-who-created-israel-palestine-conflict/

 

Without either side even noticing it, we’re coming up on the centenary of the most decisive event in the fraught history of the Israel-Palestine relationship. It was not the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist manifesto, nor the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the United Kingdom pledged its support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was not the 1948 founding of the Israeli state and subsequent Nakba—the expulsion of many thousands of Palestinians from Israel. Nor was it Israel’s occupation, following the 1967 war, of what had been Palestinian territories, or either of the two intifadas.

Rather, it was the enactment on May 26, 1924, of the Johnson-Reed Act by the Congress of the United States.

Fueled chiefly by white Protestant xenophobic fear and rage at Jews and Catholics flowing into the United States since the 1880s, the act effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe. Had that pre-Trumpian wall not gone up on America’s borders, there’s no reason to think there ever would have been more than a trickle of Jews moving to Palestine.

Consider the numbers, and whence they came. The ascension of Tsar Alexander III to the Russian throne in 1881 made state support for violent antisemitism a major priority of Russia’s government, which also ruled Poland until 1918. Bloody pogroms became a regular feature of Jewish life (and death) among the roughly five million who lived under the Tsar’s rule. Not surprisingly, millions began to leave: Approximately 2,367,000 Jews fled Europe from 1881 to 1914, when the outbreak of World War I made any such travel impossible.

Consider the numbers, and where they went. Of those 2,367,000 Jews (the vast majority from Russia and Poland) who left between 1881 and the outbreak of the war, 2,022,000 went to the United States. That’s 85 percent of the European émigrés. Just 3 percent made the trek to Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine by the end of the First World War was just 60,000, roughly one-tenth of the overall population. At the time, more Jews had come to Canada or Argentina than had come to Palestine.

To be sure, a journey from Minsk to Tel Aviv was arduous, but so was a journey from Minsk to Hamburg or Bremen, and then to the Lower East Side. Next year in Jerusalem? Apparently not.

Large-scale immigration to the U.S. recommenced with the end of World War I, but anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment was exploding in the American heartland. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan was soaring, and that iteration of the Klan, unlike its 19th-century predecessor, directed most of its ire at the immigrants, who they thought threatened America’s white Protestant identity.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe.

This was not simply a backlash of the lumpen; the xenophobia infected much of the nation’s business and political elites, and had a distinguished Brahmin pedigree. Massachusetts’s Republican senator and Mayflower descendant Henry Cabot Lodge had been introducing bills to ban the immigration of Jews and Catholics for many years, and Congress put some preliminary restrictions in place in 1922, before Johnson-Reed slammed America’s Atlantic door shut two years later. (Its Pacific door had largely been slammed shut four decades earlier with the Chinese Exclusion Act, whose scope Johnson-Reed expanded to include—by excluding—all East Asians.)

Johnson-Reed, named for Rep. Albert Johnson (R-WA) and Sen. David Reed (R-PA), had two aspects. The first restricted the yearly number of immigrants from anywhere who could come to the United States to 150,000—nothing like the million-plus who’d been coming in the years preceding the World War. The second established annual limits on who could come from particular countries, setting quotas that effectively limited immigration to people coming from Northwest Europe.

That was accomplished by setting the level of immigrants from particular countries to match the percentages of the nations of origin of Americans who were tallied in the 1890 census, when damn few Americans either came, or had their ancestors come, from places like Russia and Poland. A 1927 amendment to Johnson-Reed made those strictures a tad less Nordic and Aryan, but even under those, just 10.4 percent of the 150,000 immigrants admitted annually could come from all the nations of Eastern Europe: Russia (by then, the USSR), Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The hundreds of thousands who’d been coming each year from those nations were reduced to 15,400.

Not surprisingly, it was only then that Jewish immigration to Palestine began to soar, particularly after the Nazis took power in Germany and antisemitic movements and governments came to dominate Poland, Hungary, and much of the rest of Eastern Europe. The 3 percent of Jewish emigrants from Europe who were going to Palestine before the U.S. closed off its border soared to 46 percent from 1932 to 1939, as the Nazis took over Germany and loomed as a threat over the rest of Europe.

Which is to say that the appeal to European (or non-European) Jews of Zionism—of building a Jewish state—was not so persuasive that they chose to go to Palestine over other non-European options, the U.S. in particular, while those other options were still very real. Rather, after 1924, they came to Palestine for the same reason they had come to America: to get the hell out of a Europe where simply being Jewish was in itself dangerous. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of would-be immigrants who today trek to our southern border, they felt driven to leave their homelands and flocked to a place where they thought they could get in.

That, in and of itself, was not settler colonialism, though Zionism per se did have those aspects. Many, perhaps most, of the first generations of Zionists were also socialists, for whom the appeal of building genuinely socialist institutions like the kibbutzim was part of Zionism’s appeal. Then again, many of the Jewish immigrants who came to America were socialists, too, and they built social democratic institutions like the clothing unions and socialist political parties. In Palestine, of course, those Zionist socialist institutions were explicitly Jewish, though the ferociously anti-Palestinian wing of Zionism was centered among the explicitly anti-socialist and ultranationalist Jabotinskyites.

Ultranationalism is a politics that almost invariably creates ultranationalism in its opposing camp, and the synergies between both Palestinian and Jewish ultranationalists had both so determined to overthrow Britain’s rule over Palestine and then establish their own (Jew-free or Palestinian-free) state that each camp had elements that tried to enlist Nazi Germany in their cause. Lehi (the Stern Gang) made overtures to Hitler during World War II to join them in attacking the Brits, while the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, actually spent World War II in Germany, trying to arrange a meeting with Hitler in the hope that Germany’s war on the Jews might be extended to Palestine.

There’s plenty that both sides need to answer for over the contested history of Israel and Palestine, and there’s no question that Israel’s occupation and suppression of Palestinian territories since 1967 has been a catastrophe for Palestinians, not to mention a moral catastrophe for Israelis—in both cases, never more so than right now. But the real author of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy is the American xenophobia, nativism, and bigotry that planted the seeds for that conflict 100 years ago this month, and that, wielded against other peoples fleeing for their safety to the banks of the Rio Grande, is malignantly alive and well in America today.

[cosmicway 1,333]

The people behind the anti-Israeli campaign in the west we are witnessing are the communists, the muslim fundamentalists, the Putin spies and the neonazis - in that order.
Let's take them one by one.
First the reds. The reds have no power base any longer but they are still here. In 1972 after Munich they were staging pro-Pal demos just like they do now.
The muslim fundamentalists, those of them who reside in the west, of course do participate.
The Putin spies too. Once upon a time the Russian spies were the subject matter of the MI5 who were searching for them - nowadays you put in your doorbel "Vassily Vasilievski - Putin spy" and hop along merrily.
As for the neonazis they always "propagate the faith" but they probably offer only weak support. They don't want to appear as collaborating with the left as well as they are preoccupied with other things (brexit - attack some hapless Spanish tourists).

For years I 'm trying to comprehend the commie mentality.
Are these people blind ?
Of course a simple and perhaps valid explanation is "roubles from Moscow" - that always accounts for things.
But do they all get roubles ?
I am prepared to discount accusations against international communism for things like the Katyn forest massacre, the Berlin wall and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
About Katyn forest some commies describe it as a hapless incident, some others insist it was the Germans who did it. About Berlin wall and Czechoslovakia they will say "but the Americans did the same in Chile and Panama".
But don't they see that their system is a failure ? Hunger - destitution, destitution - hunger everyhwhere.
Don't they see that in order to prop this thing up free elections have to be abolished and all kinds of civil rights and individual freedoms ?
It's a mystery.

But who are the typical commies, besides the professional ones who make money out of it ?
In my experience it is first some state employees. As they are already state employees they don't mind statism.
Second it is the failures in life - of all kinds.
And lastly a few weak minded people who fall for the propaganda.
This explains part of the mystery.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

4 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The people behind the anti-Israeli campaign in the west we are witnessing are the communists, the muslim fundamentalists, the Putin spies and the neonazis - in that order.
 

Or maybe they could just be people tired of us funding a state with free healthcare, and a higher standard of living than the vast majority of Americans, in their genocidal effort against a bunch of women and kids? Its as simple as that really.

 

Also its a lot easier to see the crimes those kids are funding today with social media than it was 14 years ago when I was in college. You used to have to look hard to see anything other than the Isis/AlQaeda beheading video back then. Im very impressed by the spirit those kids have because I am old enough to remember us millenials(and generation X) having none of it.