Uriel238 [all pronouns]

We know they’re stealing Palestinian land. They were stealing Palestinian land when the British Empire installed Israel there. And yes, at that time George VI was glad to suggest it is right and proper to push out the lesser peoples so that the Jewish folk could settle there. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing since.

However, since then, the international community has become more aware of the humanity of peoples who are not as wealthy or white as westerners, so much like the Church in the middle ages advocating only for Jus Bellum (so that expansionist kings had to find a way to justify their rightful ownership of the places they conquered) modern nations have to find a way to legitimize the regions they annex, or the peoples they war against.

So yeah, Israel was glad to have the excuse when Hamas or Hezbollah were there to provide it. And Iran props them up (provides them materiel support) so that they have the opportunity to take shots at Israel, knowing it will drive them to cruelty while the world watches, de-legitimizing the Zionist movement in the eyes of the international community (and the public).

While Israeli patriots can politely talk about the propriety of (say) price-tag killings or the treatment of Palestinians in Hebron, the State has to be more delicate. All the more so when IDF troopers are expressing glee in the opportunity to massacre Palestinian civilians down to the last child and grandmother.

But there are no humanitarian interests at the international level. All the states are still propped up by oligarchs wanting to clear land and seize resources for their own use, and at this point, as far as I can tell, we’re all going to be killed by famine and water shortage due to ecology collapse before that changes.

A lot of things.

For one thing, Trump / Project 2025 wants to kill NATO. Trump has already sown enough distrust that Germany is looking to secure military independence from the US.

Another thing is Trump and his companion ideologues are manipulable, as per his relations with Putin, Kim Jong Un and the Sauds. Even if they can’t turn him against Israel, they can certainly goad him into making brash decisions.

Then there’s the matter that the MAGA Republican Party favors loyalty over principle, which scares away its own intelligentsia, and creates a brain drain. We already see the Project 2025 plan to replace government department staff (who have education and experience) with Trump and MAGA ideology loyalists (who do not), which is going to speed the regime’s plummet into corruption and decadence.

The latter 20th century was defined by the US being the baddest dog on the field, tempered only by the USSR being right there to harrow the US and keep it busy. Now the cold war is ended, the US has just turned into a military bully for the interests of its own oligarchs. (It doesn’t help that the white Christian nationalist movement has been pushing the US towards fascist one-party autocracy since the FDR’s New Deal, as explained in Behind the Bastards two parter How the Rich Ate Christianity ).

Genuinely free, fair states are a threat to autocrats, far more than other autocrats, so seeing the US fall to one-party autocracy is absolutely on Iran’s holiday wishlist.

They may get it too, depending on if Trump wins the election, or his coup d’etat is successful, or civil war breaks out in the States.

Yeah, Iran made me do a genocide the way a wife made her abusive spouse do a domestic violence. More that Iran knew the Israeli administration (Netanyahu and friends) were totally eager to accelerate the genocide (it has already been happening), and provided them an easy excuse, because drunk daddy can’t help himself.

This is why the US has been screaming at Bibi, Don’t! It’ll be just like Fallujah! It’s a trap! And Bibi couldn’t listen with that kind of temptation.

(And yes, this is one of those hazards whenever Trump is in the White House, because Trump can’t help himself either.)

Israel, and the current western response to Israel is laying plain for the entire international community that we are at our base, imperialists who won’t suffer non-whites or non-Christians. The US has yet to demonstrate otherwise, and in on the verge of possibly installing a one-party autocracy. Iran got all that it hoped for and more.

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

That was the point of the action. Iran understands the hatred by the Israeli state for the Palestinian people (condoned, sometimes commended by western imperialist interests, particularly the British empire and the United States) only required provocation before Israel would commit atrocities that could be called a holocaust. So the Iranian intelligence state funded Hamas to cause trouble.

And they played Netanyahu the way Martin Luther King Jr. played US police departments.

The difference is, information from Palestine leaks out better now than it did throughout the 20th century, so the global public, especially in industrialized states, gets to look at it. We get to know what is happening and it is more frightening than we imagined.

The horror of the German holocaust, according to our own nations and their state departments, is not what was done, but to whom.

Ever since the civil rights movement and the overturn of the Jim Crow laws (and the establishment of the right to interracial marriage), laws to prevent gun ownership based on race (even by implication, such as based on neighborhood) have been successfully challenged, but that doesn’t stop the police rushing to escalation once it’s established a someone has a gun, and blacks are represented disproportionately in officer-involved homicide.

But I can’t say I have the data specifically regarding armed black suspects verses armed white suspects. Still if you’re black in Missouri or Mississippi (or Oakland, California – the US teems with a lot of racial-tension hot zones) then yes, the police are more likely to escalate a situation or shoot at you than if you are white, but that’s true regardless if you have a gun.

Also blacks are convicted of crimes, violent or otherwise, statistically more often than whites with less evidence, and are given harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes, and this includes possession of illegal firearms. I suspect it’s harder for nonwhites to get concealed-carry permits in states they are needed.

(My impression is no-one really likes open-carry in urban or suburban regions. Even here in California, there are rural towns where one could carry a rifle on their back, at least during hunting season, especially since the local economies depend on hunting tourism. So you’re not going to be bothered by the county sheriff along the California / Nevada border the way you would say, in the Bay Area.)

The killing of Philando Castile in 2016 serves as an example of what blacks fear. He was pulled over for a broken tail-light, announced he was armed to Officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony PD. Yanez freaked out and shot Castile seven times, two of which penetrated his heart. (Of note is that in the last thirteen years, Castile had been pulled over 39 times in that area for broken tail-light type offenses.) Yanez was tried and acquitted. He was removed from that precinct but as far as we know Yanez is serving as law enforcement elsewhere.

…guns dont fire accidentally

Oh yes they do, and its a contingency in any theater of war. New guns are required to be safer but old guns that are less safe still exist and are in use. I was raised shooting guns well older than I was…or am.

And they can misfire which often means clearing a cartridge that might still go off. Fun times.

Depending on the state. In some states, you haven’t committed a crime until the weapon is discharged, and then not a seious one until it hits something important. But that can change based on the race and circumstances of the gunman. Most counties really don’t like black men carrying guns.

I’m worried you’re going to accidentally kill someone or shoot your femoral artery. No one is perfect.

This [is what] I was taught handling firearms in the eighties. So imagine my surprise and distress seeing the police lines during the Ferguson unrest standing or walking with their guns pointed at the crowd. One unintended discharge by law enforcement could have been disaster.

We’ve gone batshit bizarro regarding guns in the US.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis 2.0 with massive bank bailouts courtesy of US taxpayers.

Note that the obvious stratified capitalism rules (small businesses go bankrupt and die, big businesses get free government money) is what started OWS noting that all that equal playing field and invisible hand nonsense was SOME BULLSHIT. And they got quietly (brutally) swept away by law enforcement as Jon Stewart made fun of them on the Daily Show (because in the end, he too is owned by the networks).

So this time we’ll know that peaceful protests will be ignored.

What’s left is the language of the unheard.

Amazon Representative: This post is completely inaccurate

Amazon has lied before. When the right to sing is explicitly enumerated in the union-approved contract we can believe them.

In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.

This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.

That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.

My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.

In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.

That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.

Kids figure out how to provide false positives in 3… 2… 1…

European aristocracy is scared of the working class. They will tremble…! < Bolshevik chorus swells >

Sink plungers without the flange work better on sinks, in my experience. So it’s nice to have one of each.

There are different builds for drainage snakes for sinks and toilets as well.

One way to be a better neighbor is to get a good drain snake and lend it out as needed.

Clean it first. Then clean the sink after using soiled plumbing tools.

So there’s a lot going on, California is a big place, and thanks to its separation from the rest of the country (by way of the Sierra Nevadas, kinda like Switzerland in Europe) California behaves like its own country far more than Texas ever did.

And transients like California cities, or did in the 20th century, mostly because you could live without shelter all year around. That said, the responses by cities to homeless are different. Los Angeles is glad to sweep them out of sight where (pre-gentrification) San Francisco was the gateway to getting re-established (provided you were weren’t too crazy to function in employment), so train bums would go to SF when they were tired of riding the rails. SF is also where cults would go to recruit commune workers, which is how my once-transient friend ended up in Rajneeshpuram happily cleaning bungalows on his path to enlightenment.

California is desperate for public housing, and has several projects trying to build some. But NIMBY lobbies are strong. Private landowners fear their property will depreciate if public housing and corresponding community services pitch stakes in their area, which is what Gavin Newsom is contending with (or taking bribes from; we’re not sure either.) Newsome is a Pelosi - Feinstein kind of Democrat, establishment and neoliberal, and pushes for humane causes in an effort to preserve capitalist systems, less so in recognition of the bottom rungs of our stratefied society as human beings and equal participants in the community.

(The last time we had a Republican governor, it was Arnold The Gubernator Schwarzenegger, about the least-Republican Republican there was, and he still took a wrecking ball to California right after the state was fleeced by Enron. So don’t expect a party switch to improve matters)

So yeah, Newsom is okay with cleaning the streets of the riff-raff, if it will make his campaign contributors happy for a while, and won’t be used to embarrass his presidential campaign. And given this is the age of the smartphone camera, we may well get to see how brutal California law enforcement gets when released from their slips.