Politics & Stuff

[robsblubot 3,502]

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 16,831]

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 3,502]

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 16,831]

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 3,502]

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 28,768]

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 1,323]

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 4,919]

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.

[cosmicway 1,323]

3 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

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.

They cannot be people "tired of us funding ..." because we know them like false coins and of course we know their press too.
And what is happening is not genocidal. It's awful but exactly the same as what happened in Berlin in 1945, once Hitler decided to make it a fortified city.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

They cannot be people "tired of us funding ..." because we know them like false coins and of course we know their press too.
And what is happening is not genocidal. It's awful but exactly the same as what happened in Berlin in 1945, once Hitler decided to make it a fortified city.

That comparison only works if we bombed Germany in 1975 under occupation, not 1945 when they had a full military and were "independent. Israel owns the air, the sea, the borders for everything that happens there. If they start carpet bombing the hell out of a city that is mostly women and children it is very much a genocide.

The idea that kids who were born in 2000,2001,2002 has a "press" or like false coins is absurd also. Is an Israeli cutting you a check cosmic?🤔 You must be getting paid by someone to say that realistically. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,831]

21 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

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.

Exactly - and there is a sizeable bunch, globally, that hate bullying, that hate the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow human beings with the latest weaponry, that despise the arbitrary denying of water, medicine and food and basic sanitation to other human beings.

Though it seems some here in their fucked up machismo, are obviously  in favour of mass murder.

[cosmicway 1,323]

52 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

That comparison only works if we bombed Germany in 1975 under occupation, not 1945 when they had a full military and were "independent. Israel owns the air, the sea, the borders for everything that happens there. If they start carpet bombing the hell out of a city that is mostly women and children it is very much a genocide.

The idea that kids who were born in 2000,2001,2002 has a "press" or like false coins is absurd also. Is an Israeli cutting you a check cosmic?🤔 You must be getting paid by someone to say that realistically. 

In the spring of 1945 the allies controlled the air, the seas and the borders of Germany.
Also Germany's industrial capacity was gone.
Yet the Soviet army did not just park outside Berlin and Eisenhower would n't do that either had his armies not been delayed.
The Soviet artillery fire and air raids were as genocidal as you like.
It's the same story.
Here in Greece all the Hamas friends I know are reds-reddish plus a few words from the Putin fanciers. They were staging demos for Saddam Hussein in 1992, 2003 as well.
 

Edited May 7 by cosmicway

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Exactly - and there is a sizeable bunch, globally, that hate bullying, that hate the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow human beings with the latest weaponry, that despise the arbitrary denying of water, medicine and food and basic sanitation to other human beings.

Though it seems some here in their fucked up machismo, are obviously  in favour of mass murder.

People are being paid by Israel to run propaganda too though. You see it constantly from underdeveloped nations where a foreign actors(Often Russia, but Israel has started when their PR took a hit) pay people to run information for them. Its a part of winning the soft battles.

[Clockwork 1,794]

All genocides and similar atrocity committed came as a response, so they all have the "self defense" argument. 

Pretty much everyone, even the most vile people that has walked this earth all believed that they were on the right and had moral justifications. 

 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

In the spring of 1945 the allies controlled the air, the seas and the borders of Germany.
Also Germany's industrial capacity was gone.
Yet the Soviet army did not just park outside Berlin and Eisenhower would n't do that either had his armies not been delayed.
The Soviet artillery fire and air raids were as genocidal as you like.
It's the same story.
Here in Greece all the Hamas friends I know are reds-reddish and a few words from the Putin fanciers. They were staging demos for Saddam Hussein in 1992, 2003 also.
 

We had air superiority at that point. Thats where the comparison ends. You'd have a much stronger argument comparing the firebombing of Tokyo, which was mostly civilian, than most of those German bombings which still had some military use.

 

Greece is effectively a third world country. I'd imagine any event, such as Disney on Ice, would bring out reds and nazis because the youth are disillusioned by a failed state. 10-ish years ago when I started my career youth unemployment in Greece was like 70%, and now it has dropped because poor greek kids get the pleasure of serving kids, from other nations much better off than theirs, while they are on holiday. Even in America during the depression we had a robust communist party. When folks dont have anything, they'd much rather tear it all down(revolution) or blame people who dont look like them(the right). You can't compare the kids in a failed state to kids in America where we haven't seen youth unemployment like that in nearly a century. Thats creating a biased view.

Edited May 7 by Sir Mikel OBE

[cosmicway 1,323]

21 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

We had air superiority at that point. Thats where the comparison ends. You'd have a much stronger argument comparing the firebombing of Tokyo, which was mostly civilian, than most of those German bombings which still had some military use.

 

Greece is effectively a third world country. I'd imagine any event, such as Disney on Ice, would bring out reds and nazis because the youth are disillusioned by a failed state. 10-ish years ago when I started my career youth unemployment in Greece was like 70%, and now it has dropped because poor greek kids get the pleasure of serving kids, from other nations much better off than theirs, while they are on holiday. Even in America during the depression we had a robust communist party. When folks dont have anything, they'd much rather tear it all down(revolution) or blame people who dont look like them(the right). You can't compare the kids in a failed state to kids in America where we haven't seen youth unemployment like that in nearly a century. Thats creating a biased view.

There is no difference between Gaza and 1945
Or, if you look at it from the enemy side, between Gaza and Stalingrad, between Gaza and Leningrad.
When one side declares its cities fortified and the other side is advancing it is inevitable.
In WWII Paris was declared undefended, Athens was declared undefended in 1941 and Rome was declared undefended in 1944. So these cities were not destroyed.

In our case Hamas is the enemy and they are entrenched inside Gaza, so fire pours on them.

About Greece whatever.
I meant I know the folks who are demostrating here whereas those who demonstrate in New York I don't - but I guess they are people with the same mindset.
I can understand the anti-establishment attitude of some people, not the party card carrying members, the others. People have issues, we all have issues with the powers in the secret corridors of government.
But it must square up with logic and supporting Hamas and Iran does not square up with logic.
Effectively it's a gift to Donald Trumpism all this.
 

[Fulham Broadway 16,831]

1 hour ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

People are being paid by Israel to run propaganda too though. You see it constantly from underdeveloped nations where a foreign actors(Often Russia, but Israel has started when their PR took a hit) pay people to run information for them. Its a part of winning the soft battles.

Mate when they went into Gaza in 2012 ? shooting pregnant mothers, this forum had quite a few members outraged, suddenly the forum also became awash with Isareli supporting trolls. They obviously dont think this forum is big enough to worry about now they have nearly all governments and corporate media subservient.

Zuckerbergs Facebook, deleted the page of the popular Palestinian news website, the Palestinian Information Center (PIC). This act, which was carried out without even contacting the page administrators, confirms that Facebook’s war on pro-Palestine voices is continuing unabated. PIC had over five million followers

[cosmicway 1,323]

Well, as it happens, Monday morning I 'm going to stand trial accused by the neonazis (Golden Dawn) for calling them "assault battalions" on the internet.
This one took a long time to reach the chambers because of the covid situations.
They were "assault battalions" of course and their leadership is now in jail because of it, but nevertheless the public prosecutors saw it fit that I should appear on the dock.
Wish me luck please, because from Israel-Mossad-Netaniahu they did not send me a single euro for the legal expenses.
Or if you have the ear of Israel please do something.

Edited May 7 by cosmicway