Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'd actually be interested in your views. I may not agree with them, but I'd be interested. Especially if it involves any defense of Likud or Netanyahu on their River to the Sea campaign against Palestinians, because most folks I talk to, even diehard Israeli Zionists, try to distance themselves from that stuff or try to avoid addressing it all. I'd like to see a real defense of it.

Ultimately, peace will be made by people who disagree with each other talking and learning to both listen and respect each other. One of my biggest concerns is that the way this issue gets dealt with, from interaction between Biden and Netanyahu and within Congress to the way us common folk interact online, puts up barriers to that process occurring.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

My feelings are based upon having a Jewish wife and children. I don't know anything about the politics. My deepest thought is 1) Jews can't live near Hamas and 2) how else are you going to get them? Of course it is all bad.

Question for you though, looking at a map there is a bit of land that connects North and South Israel and separates the West Bank and Gaza. When they have tried talking is the dispute who get to be connected? That is who owns that land?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

On the first question, the way you get rid of Hamas is (a) using targeted special forces and police action rather than broad military assaults against a large population; (b) not enabling them (Likud has had an explicit policy of keeping Hamas strong in Gaza so Palestinians are divided - a policy that has even involved allowing Hamas to get suitcases full of cash brought in from Israel - https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-c...n-gaza-571449; (c) cutting out Hamas' foreign support from other countries through diplomacy; and (d) getting third countries to cooperate in your special forces and police actions.

This is pretty much the gameplan that defeated ISIS - while the broad military actions we did in Iran played a significant role in creating ISIS, just as this assault on Gaza is going to strengthen Hamas, because the easiest person for Hamas to recruit is a person whose innocent family was killed by an Israeli bomb. But Netanyahu has been strengthening Hamas for the last twenty years, it's kind of his go to move on Palestine.

On the second, the much discussed approach has been a walled off road between the two. In a day of remote communications and easy air travel, though, this really isn't as big an issue as some make it out to be. And almost anything is better than being stuck in the Gaza prison, where exit in any direction is virtually sealed off and where any attempt to build independent infrastructure like electric plants or cell service gets bombed.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Hamas has controlled Gaza since the second Bush Administration insisted on holding elections there, which Hamas won. There haven't been real elections since. Netanyahu has been happy to let Hamas control Gaza, to divide Palestinians. If you want to end Hamas control of Gaza, someone else has to exercise control. The Palestinian Authority has conditions that Israel does not want to meet. Israel recognizes that it would be nightmarish to try to do it itself. Egypt wants no part of it, nor does anyone else. That seems like the biggest obstacle to getting rid of Hamas, which has been intentional about hiding amongst the civilians in Gaza.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

For a while there was the quartet trying to play a role, but Netanyahu and Hamas together undermined them.

Obvious candidate is the UN, but Likud hates them and is doing it's best to poison the environment in Israel to prevent that.

I think Likud wants to divide Gaza, take the North for Israel and leave the South in a mess for a later landgrab.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't think Likud wants to try to be the government for the people living there.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I have a Jewish step-mother, sister, and other family, so I get where you are coming from.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So when I Google how many Hamas fighters are in Gaza it looks like 20,000. When I search how many Isis fighters were killed it is about 1000. So let’s say there were 2000 total. And they weren’t embedded in hospitals etc.

And Israel and the U.S. aren’t using our soldiers to be dumped off a DDay boat and charge at machine guns anymore, so I’m not sure your approach really is reality. But who knows.

Won't See Another One...
 

RIP Shane MacGowan. Fairytale of New York will hit a bit harder this year.

Re: Won't See Another One...
 

The last time I saw him, he had to be helped on and off the stage. Frankly, I'm surprised he made to 65.

Re: Won't See Another One...
 

I think that's like 130 in Shane years...

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Huh? There were multiple operations against ISIS that killed more than 1,000 - you can start here for a list of operations, and click through to some to see deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._Islamic_State Do a little more googling, or even read some wikipedia, I think you'll see estimates of fighting strength for ISIS of up to a quarter million fighters, including units taken relatively intact from Hussein's armed forces that included traditionally trained (even by the US Army) military commanders as well as guerrilla forces.

Of course, if you're counting deaths of ISIS you also have to draw the line somewhere as to when al Qaeda in the Iraq/Syria area morphs into ISIS (e.g., that will exclude things like Falluja, an undoubted part of the war on terror but before the morph). It also looks like that list doesn't include ISIS deaths at the hands of, say, Syria or Turkey. Those countries actually played a pretty big role in the defeat of ISIS (though in Assad's case often replacing it with something pretty objectionable in its own right).

In general, you'll also find that the ratio of civilian deaths to ISIS deaths was sub 1:1 through most of the war on terror; it you believe the numbers that are being attributed to Israeli military sources, it's looking like the ratio in Gaza is significantly higher than 10:1 and maybe as high as 20:1; numbers from UN sources are pretty close to that 20:1 figure. That's what will create your future Hamas members and that's what the US military and Biden administration are getting much more worried about.

Hamas is a smaller, less well organized, and less well funded operation than ISIS was, whatever your googling says.

Besides those actual campaigns, though, a lot of deaths of key figures in ISIS were one-off special forces operations or police actions by the local country.

By the way, if you want the best comparison to Israel's strategy against Hamas, it is Assad's strategy against his opponents - lost of arial bombing, relatively little use of special forces, a disregard for civilian losses (though Israel is racking up civilian kills at a rate that significantly exceeds Assad's) and a willingness to use collective punishment. And that strategy has not worked well for Assad, while he is generally viewed as having "won" his civil war, he is still not in control of some parts of Syria and a very large part of Syria is only tenuously under his control.

Re: Won't See Another One...
 

The mere amount of damaging bacteria one acquires through open and bleeding gums should've doomed him two decades ago.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Maybe it's geographic. These folks think it makes sense to protest in front of an Israeli restaurant and chant accusations of participation in genocide at its owner. Folks ain't too swift in these parts.

There is some rhetorical fuckery afoot there. But similarly, what cannot be avoided is the double standard on display before Congress two days ago, in which university presidents stumbled over their words to dissemble on why it might be, but not might not be, a violation of school code to speak in favor of Hamas depending on "context."

Speak about the trans and various other marginalized peoples as the Jews have been spoken about on campus and you'll be expelled. Why are the Jews treated differently? Is it perhaps because of a bizarre Marcusian view that one may speak in vile fashion about those deemed "oppressors" or "colonizers" (based on a hideous stereotype of Jews as uber-successful or conspiratorial, a la Protocols of Zion). Is it that all language is actually power, and it can always be used against those in power, without limitation - the suggestion of Foucault, a discredited buffoon? I honestly don't know. But a double standard is being used.

I see an intersection of two peculiar forces. One is Jewish sensitivity to anti-Semitism. Another is our nation's bizarre fixation with identity politics. It seems that Jews are trying to expand the definition of anti-semitism as broadly as possible at the same time the younger generations of college kids and those who like to protest things here are applying a rule that overly-harsh criticism of a group deemed to be "in power" must be forgiven. The oppressed must always be excused if they go too far because they are victims (and this includes kids at $90k per year colleges who sympathize with the oppressed). And on the other side, anything said in criticism of Israel is anti-semitism (akin to the lurid and appalling overuse and expansion of the concept of "racism" here over the past few years, designed to allow those who wish to use it as a cudgel to do so recklessly).

People are acting, as they seem to always be these days, unreasonably. And I think they all know it. Rather than try to hold conflicting thoughts, and see fault and valid points on both sides, they want to silence each other. This conflict might as well be any other in that regard.

We've lost the United States. A country of idiots refusing to compromise and think critically and engage opposing views genuinely is something. But it's not the USA.

Re: Won't See Another One...
 

And the Ruby Room is closing - https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/...g-18540620.php

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The article leaves out a couple of key facts there: Goldie's has been raising money specifically for Israeli soldiers and there are allegations that it fired an employee for wearing a pin showing the Palestinian flag.

When it comes to randomly targeted protests at Synagogues or against any restaurant simply because it serves Israeli or Jewish food or is run by Jews, I think it is crazy, anti-Semitic, and ineffective to boot. (I'm actually going out of my to eat at Israeli or Jewish and Palestinian restaurants these days (lots of people are harassing Palestinians restauranteurs, too). It helps that I love the food of course.) But I don't think this one was a random target.

Still, I'd rather see people targeting Bill Ackman. Dude needs to go back to pushing runs on banks.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Ackman seems to be everywhere these days. You'd think a busy hedge fund manager would have less time on his hands.

Yeah, Goldie's did fire the folks who wore pins and he donates to Israeli military. And I think that's a basis for protestors to picket the place. But accusing him of genocide? Let's pump the brakes a bit.

Back to Ackman, there are three problems with what he's doing. First, it's naked cancel culture. Second, among the kunckledragging actual anti-semites out there (and we all know there's a healthy number of them), firing of the Penn President and possibly Gay will be seen as "Rich Jewish financiers controlling everyone." Third, isn't the whole idea of free speech and expression to allow people to say foolish shit so that: (a) The popularity of dumb thoughts will be known to all; (b) The identity of people who think dumb thoughts will be known to all; and, (c) The dumb thoughts can be publicly countered. Call me nuts, but I want to know not only who around me is a bigot, but who around me is nuts or just plain fucking stupid. Is is better to have that sort of thing fester underground?

Final thought: Academic Admin's problem is not only having dumb ideas, but being in perpetual CYA mode. Those Presidents looked like fools because they endlessly dissembled. All one had to answer Stefanik with was, "Yes, someone stating a desire to commit genocide on any group violates our code." Nothing more, nothing less. But they couldn't, because they were so used to searching their minds for something to say that wouldn't upset someone they missed the one thing they could say that would have shut up Stefanik.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

For what it's worth, that's not right. I'm not going to defend the university presidents, because they did a shitty job, but if you want to understand why they said what they said and what the free speech policies actually are, read Popehat (Ken White) ("Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions") on this. You and he come from a very, very similar place on First Amendment issues, and I think you will be sympathetic to his point of view.

eta:

The Presidents fell flat because they they had been prepped by lawyers and HR people and had nothing beyond that to say. If you want to sound like a University President, the answer to that question is, we are running a university here and genocide is wrong. I will let the university's lawyers decide whether a specific act violates a specific policy, but the point of a university is to answer ideas with other ideas to get to the truth, and that is my focus as the university's leader.

But none of them were hired to answer yes or no questions from Rep. Stefanik, alas.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I agree that it was an obvious trap and am amazed they fell into it. Also agree that the desire to answer complex questions in soundbites, and the Torquemada act Stefanik used to force yes or no answers to hypotheticals she then characterized as she wanted after the fact, are unfortunately deplorable elements of modern discourse in this polarized shitshow of a country.

She was an embarrassment.

But I think there was an incredibly elegant answer to her questions which would have shut her down. "Our policy on free speech is as broad as possible, but as an institution we thoroughly investigate any speech advocating violence against any groups. If it is deemed a credible or imminent threat, it is against our policies. We do this to balance safety and the first amendment."

If that's too long, one can take the Joseph Welch vs. McCarthy route: "I'm not here to engage hypotheticals or strawmen. I'm here to be asked about facts. That's why I'm under oath."

Yup. That's another way to do it.

When put in that spot, I think you have to use the "I'm going to refrain from commenting on hypotheticals" and repeat it as many times as needed. The only way to stanch badgering is to refuse to feed it words. Run out the clock.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Small World Dept.: Her name was familiar, and I just placed it. The WilmerHale partner who (disastrously?) prepped two of the three university presidents for their congressional debacle used to work with me as a paralegal. I remember her as quite sharp.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So my current NextDoor fun controversy: my tiny suburb is pretty heavily Jewish. Someone put several of the “missing” posters on street light posts. This weekend there was an outraged post about a confrontation between someone pro-poster and a guy who was tearing them down, complete with photos of the tear down guy. The posts said the police were investigating that as a hate crime. Someone replied that em felt one shouldn’t attach posters to street light posts. That didn’t go over well.

I guess I’m wondering, is tearing down those posters really different in kind from stealing political yard signs, or is it a hate crime? I see it as closer to the sign stealing, plus I’m sure there is a law against putting stuff on the street light post. Thoughts?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Probably depends on your state's definition of hate crime.

Maybe stealing lawn signs qualifies under some states' hate crime acts.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

However dumb some univ. admin's ideas may be, I can guarantee one thing: their donors can come up with something stupider.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thanks. Was looking for people's actually feelings on the issue, not a lawyer answer.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Ah, well, my feelings are that it is bad but is indeed more like stealing lawn signs. I'm actually not a fan of getting too excited about petty vandalism.

There have been a bunch of Catholic Churches vandalized over abortion issues, and I know some Catholics who have been quite upset by it. My reaction has been to contribute a bit of money to the churches to fix the vandalism and suggest that everyone move on. A good friend of mine in Israel had a similar approach when the Church of Loaves and Fishes was hit by arson by some Jewish fundamentalists. He organized a work party and contributed a bunch of fish (he's a fish farmer). I think more positivity came out of him and his Jewish friends working with the Palestinian Christians than the negativity causes by the vandals.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I was going to respond to this with something snarky like "yes, there should never be any hyperbole in one line chants during rallies" but thinking about it I'm no longer sure it's hyperbole.

What is the word to describe the nearly complete (>90%) displacement of a people, the destruction of all of their universities, most of their hospitals, their libraries, their birth and death records, their churches and mosques, their bakeries and other food supplies, and a large portion of their housing, the control and restriction of their infrastructure, including power, water, and communications, and the widespread random bombing of the populace, with effort to specifically target its writers, journalists, and poets, with the restriction of basic humanitarian aid meant to avoid starvation and widespread disease, all combined with the express intent to occupy the country and impose on those who remain a government by occupiers that will impose martial law and restrict the countries' ability to rebuild, to feed people, and to provide healthcare, all while establishing settlers with preferred legal rights, even including the ability to commit violence against the residents with virtual impunity? And outlawing such basic expressions of nationalism or cultural identity as showing their countries' flag or reading their countries' poets? What is the word for that? Genocide, ethnic cleansing, something else?

When Raz Segal wrote his already seminal brief article making the case for calling this genocide and even going farther and calling it "obvious" and a "textbook case", I disagreed with him. But I think he's proving right. https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide Support for Israel's war today, particularly without restrictions, and after seeing everything Israel is doing and that its officials are saying, right out in the open, is effectively support for Genocide. It's a bitter truth I speak.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

As usual, there is a lot of talking past each other with some using genocide to mean "deeply unjust action taken by bad people" and others using its closer to the legal definition. On the latter, I think it's pretty clear.

On the former, I think about it the way I do our invasion of Iraq. Tragic, wrong, and a massive mistake that will cost many innocent lives. And yet difficult to resist in our grief and rage.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Very much Raz' point, that legally this is pretty clearly in the category of genocide. The thing is, that legal category comes about based on the really horrible things done in the past. The unexpected part of the legal definition for some people is that genocide can focus on things that deny a people's ability to identify as a people, regardless of whether it involves things like concentration camps.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think it's another form of cancel culture horseshit.

The proper reply to such posters if one takes issue with them is to put up posters supporting Palestinians.

Of course, the next question will be, "What if the entire area is covered in posters of hostages?"

In that instance, the proper response is to paper over up to half of the space with your pro-Palestinian posters. One is allowed equal time and space, approximating what he'd get were it a formal debate, but he may not take all the time and space.

And yes, for the next inquiry - this confers a duty on the part of people posting anything regarding the conflict to not take all of the space initially. (This should be obvious as such behavior is rude, as it blocks others who might want to just post a pic of their missing cat, but given modern America has no fucking manners or sense of shame or propriety, it needs explaining.)

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You and I rarely agree on anything, but here we're almost entirely aligned. Only difference is I think our grief justified Afghanistan, but not Iraq.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Our actions in Afghanistan were justified, just as Israel targeting Hamas is justified. Iraq was not justified. Irrational yet understandable on some level, like Israel's lack of proportionality in Gaza.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Gay's later statements ("I'm sad," "My truth," and other noxious wokespeak) have shown her to be a creature living exclusively in the increasingly fabulist world of academia and an embarrassment to the school.

But Harvard did the right thing by keeping her. (For the wrong reasons, I'm sure, which are avoidance of protests if she were fired, and avoidance of appearing to have bowed to Bill Ackman.) First, a person is more than their most notable gaffe. She doesn't deserve to lose a job for once speaking in an avoidant fashion on the advice of counsel. Second, a mob of voices on the internet and among pundits and donors should not control what a school does or does not do. Bill Ackman is not in charge of Harvard's standards. No institution is required to bow to a group of people like Ackman or Stefanik who on one day cry about censorship and cancel culture and the next use exactly those same tools to stifle their perceived enemies.

Free speech should - must - be as close to absolute as possible in every conceivable regard. One cannot run around decrying woke campus speech codes and then attempt to employ his own.

This debacle highlights that we've become a nation of authoritarians. Everyone just wants what he or she wants and doesn't really give a fuck about any actual principles of freedom.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I disagree on Iraq. I think that was a cynical ploy to develop a staging area in the middle east. FWIW, I think Wolfowitz, Perle, and Cheney deserve to tried for war crimes in absentia for it. Bush gets a pass for being too dumb to have participated knowingly, and Rumsfeld is dead.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It wasn't our grief that justified Afghanistan, it was that the government there supported and hosted a group that attacked us. And that much at least is pretty similar to what is happening in Gaza, where the de facto government is Hamas. No one thinks Hamas is a legitimate government, but not many people thought that the Taliban was either. Both are a bunch of nihilist thugs who took power by force and will not give it up willingly.

But Afghanistan is not urban like Gaza is, and the Taliban did not hide in the cities, but rather melted into the countryside. So we didn't have the same impetus to level Kabul or Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You may remember that in Afghanistan our initial involvement was supporting existing forces within Afghanistan looking to overthrow the Taliban. That is also a big difference.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'd just like to wish very Happy Holidays to everyone complaining about Starbucks cups.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That depends.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

An interview with my son's classmate, shot in Vermont for being Palestinian. This story has disappeared from most media.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12...nan_abdalhamid

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

2023 was a great year professionally, and personally, but the news was bad overall. Hopefully 2024 hits on all levels! Happy to know you all, and wishing the best for your 2024s.