Genuine question for Americans: donyou not think that a Democrat today would be leading the same war? We're talking about a party that facilitated, and took part in, 1 year of genocide.
In what world could you imagine Israel's planned war against Iran not being automatically supported by whatever US party was in power?
The default US policy tends towards starting wars in the middle east. But even very hawkish previous administrations never started this particular one, for the reasons we're seeing right now. So I strongly doubt a Harris administration would have.
You're also ignoring just how far outside the norms Trumps administration is. They're entirely dysfunctional, breaking all kinds of laws and full of unqualified extremist with their own agendas.
Yes, I think the Democrats would be fighting this war for Israel, just like they did in Gaza. If anything, it's almost good that Trump is leading this as it means the war does not have the support of the neoliberal citizens (politicians are another story). He's also even less competent, "saying the quiet parts out loud"... This is true accelerationism. Clearly it would be better to abandon Israel and not fight any of their wars for them, but flailing incompetently, sinking Israel and creating an Iranian super-power is the second best outcome.
You are being downvoted for stating the truth - you are absolutely right that the Democrats too would have fully supported Israel's attack on Iran. Let us not forget that Biden played a major role in Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza (and now in West bank) by helping the IDF spread its propaganda hoax that "Hamas beheaded babies", in the western media (Biden lied that he had personally seen the "horrific pictures " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_baby_beheading_hoax ). Of course, unlike Trump, a Democratic party administration would have resorted to hypocrisy and propaganda that the war was for "democracy", "human rights", "save jews", "fight terrorism" etc. etc. But it would have been much shorter - they would have killed the Iranians leaders too, and struck military targets and then stopped.
Your assumption here is that, since sanctions strengthen the regime, not having sanctions weakens the regime, which is not logical.
Not having sanctions potentially strengthens a regime more than sanctions do, embeds them in the global geopolitical/cultural/economic stage, normalises their behaviour, and goes against a lot of people's deontology.
Look at Israel: no sanctions, strong Zio regime, majority of US/German pop supported the "self-defense" argument for decades, complete normalisation of Palestinian genocide until the horror reached an unbearable threshold. Etc., etc.
Yes, sanctions are far from perfect, but I strongly believe that a world with Israel santioned would have been a much better place for everyone, including the Israelis (from having to contend with their ideology).
Edit: I'm also aware that my argument is not perfect either. For example, I wouldn't qualify what Cuba has or what Iraq had as sanctions in the sense that I'm talking about: these are to my eyes an economic war of aggression by the US/West. What I'm defending is sanctions on fascist and ethonationalist global/regional superpowers that are engaging in large-scale horror. But I'm aware how leaky my definition is.
You can do sanctions on items that allow the regime wage wars (weapons and dual-use products), yes, that can work. Or wide sanctions on small countries such as Israel can be a credible deterrent, since it lacks economic depth to find substitutes.
However, wide sanctions on large countries such as Russia or Iran are now proven to be quite ineffective in the long run. Even worse, by preventing the creation of a middle-class, you won't have the conditions to start a democracy later, after a possible regime change.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it's what data shows.
And sanctions don't prevent countries from committing atrocities either. What about the deaths and suffering induced by sanctions? 500k Iraqi children were estimated to have died due to the US sanctions. The architect of the policy told that it was "worth it". Was it?
The strain(s) of Christianity we have today are in large part the result of chance and power plays, it's a fascinating history.
More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.
A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).
A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.
Do you have any recommended reading on the history of Christianity? I find it challenging to find unbiased / purely historical explanations of how we got to this point.
"Can't say too much, but I'm one of the world's biggest experts on the Middle East, and basically everyone accusing Israel of genocide (so all the NGOs, the journalists, all these other people with their lying eyes) is wrong. And Forensic Architecture are basically shills (one of their team members comes from Muslamistan, need I say more)."
Do you guys hear yourselves? Your posts being flagged all over should give you an indication of how it sounds.
Americans are under the delusion that Democrats are the second coming of Christ, even after it enabled and took part in genocide. To anyone outside of the West, the differences between the two parties are inexistent.
The memoryholing of all Democrats' failures, corruption, and horror is painful to watch. But they do it with a different kind of posturing, and this seems to be sufficient to most.
Yeah that's the really painful bit alright. The pretence isn't even good.
But they'll get so mad at you for pointing out the obvious.
It's been this way for a long time - MLK pointed all this out 6 decades ago. It's gotten worse since, to the point where over 98% of US voters in 2024 didn't hold enabling live-streamed genocide as a red line for their vote.
I'll keep talking about it, and USians will probably keep getting mad at me for it. Ah well.
I think that it is what you know of the history of animal domestication and of pets that makes you think that there is an acceptable and low amount of suffering.
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.
I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again. At some point it becomes institutionalised at which point you become a propaganda outfit for a foreign entity publishing their statements verbatim.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
>I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
Telegraph is paywalled, got a source I can read without forking out?
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
As I started reading through the report (published in the Telegraph, almost entirely about bias in BBC Arabic coverage), I found it rather humorous: the incidents mentioned are undeniably instances of bias, but the few cases the author of the report was able to painstakingly find over 2 years of coverage were a rounding error in comparison to the daily pro-Israel bias in every major Western publication.
It stands to reason that it'd be a rounding error, both because of the overwhelming, omnipresent pro-Israel bias displayed by the mainstream media and almost every government, in full opposition to the popular sentiment and the communications of NGOs or humanitarian law institutions, and because of the complete disconnect between the casualties on the Israeli side versus the many tens of thousands of dead in Gaza...
Then I got to the section of the report that questioned the casualty numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health... This has been a consistent target for criticism by Israel, but the criticism has repeatedly failed to find any purchase: the MoH methodology is widely understood to be a (severe) undercount of the dead, there has been no reasonable deconstruction of the methodology, there has been no estimates (outside of genocide apologists) that have been below the MoH numbers. At this point, criticism of the MoH methodology is about as credible as descriptions of Gaza protests as "pro-Hamas protests".
So when I got to this section, I just stopped reading, because every other claim, which had already been laughably limited in scope, became outright questionable.
Just posting this here to avoid someone seeing 2 links (including "honest reporting"...) and believing that the "pro-Hamas bias" accusations against the BBC are in any way robust.
I'm an avid reader of history books (antiquity, middle ages), and I'd say I'm very picky, trawling through reviews and recommendations from trusted sources before deciding on a book.
I have already come across books that were a slog to read because of the author's simplistic worldview or obvious contrarian agenda (so I can definitely relate), but I've also read some masterpieces (for example, Kaldellis I believe is solid).
Unfortunately I don't count any historians among my friends, so I'd welcome any recs from you for authors that are the least bad, or a teardown of main antiquity/middle ages historians.
I don't know whether I'd call myself anti-immigration, but I'm as left as they come and I don't think that being pro-immigration is a left/right value. You can be on the left and have objections to immigration, you can be on the right and welcome immigration.
Most people think that being anti-immigration equals being racist and wanting refugees to be turned away. And given your comment, that is also what you seem to believe. However, the large majority of immigration is state-sanctioned (so work visas, etc.), is not the immigration you hear about in the news or that racists talk about, and it's neither a left nor a right issue.
Immigration does have economic benefits, but I'm certain you'll agree nothing in the world is only good or only bad. Immigration does lead to larger competition on housing (more people = more demand), and generally this happens in the cities where the housing crisis is the worst. So more immigration undoubtedly benefits landlords.
Immigration also means more competition for jobs, which leads in practice to lower wages. So it also benefits capital-owners.
So you can be leftist, campaign to increase intake of refugees, campaign against the housing crisis and wealth inequality, and be against immigration.
As an example that might change your opinion (beyond talking to a leftist who does not think immigration is nothing but good): when the Tories came to power after Brexit, they implemented policies that greatly facilitated immigration (2-4 times yearly intake to what it was before Brexit) [0]. Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?
I would consider myself well on the left too, and I mostly agree with what you're saying. But I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions. Immigration can be a net positive for the general population, if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections, etc.
> Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?
Corporations and the old right, maybe, but the new populist right is very much anti-immigration. It is their main talking point and platform in today's political landscape.
> I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions.
I think you're again fighting a right-wing anti-immigration stance. I'm talking about the opposite of that.
> Immigration can be a net positive [...] if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections
I'm certain you can see that this is a huge if. In practice, limiting immigration can indeed avoid worsening the housing crisis or decreasing wages, which can indeed help the relevant unions/charities campaign more effectively.
Reasoning by extreme: would you agree that importing 2M people per year to the UK would make the housing market and wages worse, independent of any ifs? Then you agree that there is a threshold where there is too much immigration, even with perfect conditions.
> right is very much anti-immigration
The Tories were very much anti-immigration, if you looked at their talking points. They were very much pro-working class, and Labour is very-much pro-human rights and pro-democracy. What they do is different.
Being anti-immigration is actually left-wing and pro-labor in most functional countries in the EU. It’s only in the US and the UK where being left-wing also being means pro-open borders, however odd that may be.
In what world could you imagine Israel's planned war against Iran not being automatically supported by whatever US party was in power?
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