• Veraxus
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    1032 years ago

    How about: No arms deals with any entity that indiscriminately murders innocent people, women, and children?

  • @Nobody@lemmy.world
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    962 years ago

    I’m still not seeing why Israel is being treated as a priority over or at least equal to Ukraine. Ukraine is up against a legitimately strong adversary using human wave tactics. Israel is dropping bombs seemingly indiscriminately on mostly civilians. Ukraine is fighting for its existence. Israel is getting revenge on its much, much weaker neighbor.

    If Iran and its proxies enter the war, that might change the calculations, but that hasn’t happened yet.

    • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      112 years ago

      They would fold under even the littlest bit of BDS, but that’s not going to happen because the US sees themselves in Israel.

      • @Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Thus why nearly every state has made it illegal for any company that works with the government to be BDS-positive.

      • @imgprojts@lemmy.ml
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        62 years ago

        Example: we don’t vote for the president or the people who actually elect him. Yet, we are bombarded with ads about which to pick! Why?

        • @_bug0ut@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I mean, that’s not entirely accurate - a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for the slate of electors tied to said candidate - effectively a vote for your candidate, albeit indirectly. Electors can, however, be required to vote according to popular vote as required by the state they’re electors in. Or they could have pledged to vote according to specific party. I don’t know for sure, but I assume state elector requirements override party pledges.

          My understanding is that when it was devised, it was a compromise between direct democracy (which would honestly be potentially dangerous - how many people do you know where you can’t help but go, “Fuck… This guy can vote.”) and election via congressional vote. It certainly ain’t perfect and I have no bias towards it, but it’s a system like anything else that people tend to point at and blame when things don’t go their way or just ignore or even defend when things do go their way.

          • @imgprojts@lemmy.ml
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            02 years ago

            Biden is president. Things went my way. But let’s imagine that this was how you got lunch.

            Hmm, Josh! I want a hamburger!.. okay buddy I promise I’ll bring you a hamburger. I’m just going to be your food delegate in the food acquisition team.

            Josh! I want a salad! … and I want a spoon full of extra virgin olive oil!. Josh I want an apple! Hey Josh can I get some Doritos crushed in a bowl and mixed with jalapeno and chicken nuggets!

            Then Josh goes to the big food acquisition meeting… My team wants a spoon full of extra virgin olive oil!

            Then you wait half an hour and you get a turkey sandwich but you’re vegan so you eat the three onion rings.

            70 percent of the office was vegan too, but only 5 of the food delegates were vegan. The other 20 were old timers that have been ordering the food for the past seven years. They like turkey sandwiches. So you get turkey sandwich.

            I hope you enjoy your turkey sandwich 🥪. 😂 LOL. At least it wasn’t a lump of lard with a tupee.

            • @_bug0ut@lemmy.world
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              12 years ago

              The long, drawn out metaphorical explanation was unnecessary and frankly kind of condescending.

              I’m not over here trying to be some champion of the electoral college and I’d be more interested in seeing a real push for ranked choice or one of its cousins.

              The point I was making was that if you sat at home and didn’t vote at all, your chosen candidate would never see the inside of the oval office and I went into my understanding of why it is the way it is. Ultimately, voting under the current system is not entirely worthless as you seemed to claim in the original post I responded to.

              We’ve had something like 59 elections in total and 5 of them involved the winning candidate losing the popular vote but winning the election by way of the electoral college. Only one of those elections - the very first - involved anything even remotely close to your example (but still not42.3% vs 31.6%). The other 4 had a difference of like 2% or less between the two leading candidates.

              The electoral college was devised as a compromise between direct democracy and congressional voting and I’m sure it was done in good faith to try to make sure everyone was represented, but this system seems to truly show its cracks when we’re facing an insanely stark national split like we see today and there’s no argument that we should probably shake things up and get rid of it.

    • @gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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      52 years ago

      Biden said something like: “If there was no Israel, we’d have to invent it.”

      The US loves having a highly militarized, violent, totally amoral and 100% US-dependent proxy next to all those oil fields. The last thing the US wants is peace in the middle east. This is just divide-and-conquer 101.

  • krzschlss
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    2 years ago

    I don’t like this trend! War movies in 10-20 years will be boring. No Rambos, no Schwarzeneggers, no Spielberg and Tom Hanks emotional patriotism! No funny casual racism, no casual homophobia, no casual misoginy… Did Mark Hamil play a terrorist in Star Trek after all? The End of an Era. We’re gonna have to watch films about how a bribed White House politicant struggles to keep up with weapon manufacture demands while managing to convince his wife not to divorce him because she feels neglected since he’s never at home… directed by Clint Eastwood.

    That’s boring. I’m out!

    • krzschlss
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      32 years ago

      Genocide is illegal (I think, it’s kinda blurry for decades now). Don’t see those people concerned about it. I don’t think these people care about law. They bend it to their will, like they do with their tax-paying citizenry who vote and pay for them.

    • krzschlss
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      2 years ago

      Genocide is illegal (I think, it’s kinda blurry for decades now). Don’t see those people concerned about it. I don’t think these people care about law. They bend it to their will, like they do with their tax-paying citizenry who vote and pay for them.

  • HuddaBudda
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    62 years ago

    But during some of those conversations, managers have told staffers they should not expect to influence U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine regardless of their national security chops, according to five current and one recently departed State Department officials who talked to HuffPost.

    Keep in mind, that Biden has asked for a humanitarian cease fire in Gaza. This information is like fresh of last night, so I don’t expect news agencies to catch up fast.

    It looks like Biden is lagging behind public opinion on this one, but he is turning course.

    What that means going forward will depend on how much aid is let in Gaza by Israel.

    • @NightOwl@lemm.eeOP
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      152 years ago

      Biden is specifically avoiding the term “cease-fire”:

      The White House has refused to call for a cease-fire but has signaled that the Israelis should consider humanitarian pauses to allow civilians to receive aid and for foreign nationals trapped on the strip to leave Gaza.

      • HobbitFoot
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        42 years ago

        Yeah, but probably because using the term would cause major political problems for him.

    • cannache
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      02 years ago

      It’s like the war on drugs but worse. Technically the US doesn’t really have a horse in the race so to speak. I doubt that the USA, nor the oil giants across the Middle East are inclined to involve themselves in a potential paradigm shift of global politics into WW3 directly after the disaster that was Trump’s election loss and subsequent social disorder.

      Personally although I feel like a one state secular, democratic solution but with multiple internal use passports would suit the whole lot of them better. If you choose to carry card X y or z you become the subject to a different set of religious rules return unique benefits. You can theoretically try to carry all three but you’re going to have a hard time computing let alone complying with all of the religious rules all the time.

      If we ignore the humanitarian issue of the bombings so to speak, because war, like hell is a gift in itself by all measures, I think the fairest solution would simply be for the most stable, responsible and directly involved guy in the room - Benny boy, to pay up and fix his own shit he’s created by actually building more homes and infrastructure on both sides of the fence and giving the Palestinians a card printing system, redraw the lines on the map and let them decide their own laws, rather than kicking people out of their homes and bulldozing stuff without a plan, creating a system of displacement which realistically nobody wants, just to let the terrorists come back and make pipe bombs and other weapons from the scraps.

      Hopefully someone found my verbal diarrhoea to be constructive

    • Karyoplasma
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      2 years ago

      Not quite true. Israel gets a lot of support from the US government because it’s a useful ally.

      It’s the vanguard in the coveted Middle Eastern region (lots of oil) that is incidentally hated by everyone around them so you can easily use their status to provoke proxy wars, then invade and claim plausible deniability by saying you just helped out your ally.

    • Nah fam. Miss me with that nonsense. Why would a tiny nation control the US? They have influence with American interests in many ways, but control it? It makes no sense. The only position that this would make sense from is the same antisemetic cabal bullshit. A small group controls the world alright. The wealthy, most of whom are white Christians. They control things, not Jews.

    • kayjay
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      62 years ago

      The point of Congress is to be able to challenge the singular power of the head of state if they get too power-hungry… it doesn’t work if you can just disregard it whenever you feel it’s inconvinient. Do you want a (for now) democratically elected dictatorship where there is no challenge to the power of the president?