Lord Ratner

Well yeah obviously, you've demonstrated particularly unbiased judgment of anyone involved with this administration. It should be no surpris that the only ones you like are the ones you agree with. Tulsi is one step away from becoming a Joe Rogan conspiracy theorist. And at this point anybody who brings up Epstein should be disregarded immediately as either too dishonest or too blinded to trust their judgment or assessment of, well, anything. Just another social-mania at its finest.

You guys can't possibly be this unlikable in the office, right? Actually what he said, if you must translate his already clear quote, was: "I could see the Republicans and Democrats both abusing this." And what a wonderful day for you, even Ted Cruz says the Republicans aren't on board with this: Cruz said about 45 of the 53 Senate Republicans were attendance and "at least half of them were blasting the attorney general and they were pissed." "They were screaming at the acting attorney general," he said. "There were multiple senators who were yelling at the attorney general — and it was not calm, it was yelling — and they were saying this feels like self-dealing." Now since you insist on making it partisan, when is the last time the Democrats revolted over a Democrat president being sketchy? Serious question.

The last of the glamour hires. I had high hopes for Bondi, but Gabbard and Noem seemed doomed from the start. Gabbard is isolationist to a fault, and Noem is a clown.

There is a much better case for calling the campaign an operational failure than a moral failure. The only part of that article I find silly is the section on hostages. Israel was obviously not prioritizing the hostages. They were just saying that because the Israelis have a long history of "recovery at any cost." That's why Hamas took hostages in the first place, and I'm sure they were shocked when Israel chose to let many of them languish/die rather than give the upper hand to Hamas.

I'm not so sure that needs to be admitted. Trump has said publicly that he thinks the Iranians are just screwing around. The only way to "win" is to get us to give up. And I think they're looking at the last 30 years of American conflict and hoping that the American people are going to get bored of this, and eventually the administration will be pressured into giving up. So the name of the game is stalling. I actually think the administration figured this out a while ago, which is why we aren't dropping bombs right now, despite Trump's penchant for blustery language. A blockade is boring and cheap, as far as the court of public opinion is concerned. It's also devastating to Iran. And Europe, and Asia, if this thing continues through June. But no one's going to get shot down during a blockade, Iran is obviously out of any meaningful number of drones or TBMs, and so there's nothing particularly newsworthy about what's going on now. Gas prices are up, but not to the point that we're seeing any sort of major disruptions in the economy. And Trump has the ultimate lever on gas prices, so if things do get out of hand he can bring them down (in the US) instantly and persistently. So... We wait. I think it is notable that the administration was telling the Iranian people not to protest or leave their homes throughout the first month of the campaign, and they have given no signal suggesting otherwise. I wonder if they're waiting for the economic situation to get so bad that the people are "primed" for another rebellion, this time with a greatly weakened IRGC.

Ok ok ok, my bad, I thought that you might have been trolling before but now I see the bit. Still not up to the standard of general Chang back in the heyday, but I should have caught on earlier all the same. Bravo! 😂🤣

Thanks for creating the Cliff's notes. My eyes started to glaze over after the first paragraph. I felt like Boomer6 when he sees more than three syllables without a space between them 😂🤣

I'll be fine 😂🤣

Your entire point relies on mischaracterizing every element of the war. Israel has not targeted civilian non-combatants. At any point. However terrorist combatants, or military combatants depending on how you want to characterize Hamas, have absolutely hidden themselves and their equipment under and behind civilians. Which, as anybody who stayed awake during a law of armed conflict class would remember, makes them viable targets. Hamas did not Target Israeli military installations on October 7th. They targeted a music festival and a bunch of pacifist towns. They didn't walk away from women and children who were alone in the house unarmed, they raped and killed them. The women and children were the target, not collateral damage. So you're either a troll, an anti-semite, or an idiot. I suspect all three.

Well, on one hand you believe in the actual definition of genocide, but then on the other you twist terrorism into fitting something that it is not. We just keep coming back to this world of utopian hypotheticals. There has never been a war waged on the scale of what Israel did in Gaza with so few casualties. Ever. Not even close. There are no wars where women and children are spared. Even the concept of innocent children is wildly inflated. If a 14-year-old is holding an AK-47, is he innocent? Is he a child? You keep trying to frame the action itself as the key element of moral versus immoral. Blowing up pagers for example. I'm baffled that someone could be in the military and not understand how obviously useless that framing is. Distinction, necessity, and proportionality are loac concepts specifically for determining whether an action, murder, is moral or immoral. None of the women or children killed on October 7th needed to die to protect the Palestinians from a lethal threat. Not only that, it put them at far greater danger. I just keep going back to how crazy it is the amount of effort you put into excusing the actions of groups like Hamas or the IRGC when they don't even believe in the nonsense you're spouting. They are not defending their wives and daughters against the Israelis. They believe that it is a religious catastrophe of the highest word that Israel exists. They are completely uninterested in peaceful coexistence, and they do not pretend and be interested in it. It's so curious when people get indignant at being called anti-semitic, when they are carrying the water of groups that are openly and proudly call for the actual genocide of the Jewish people. It's akin to saying "I'm not racist, but I think the KKK has an interesting point, and you should at least be able to see things from their perspective." If a man straps his daughter to his chest, breaks into your house and attempts to kill your family, putting a bullet through the girl to stop the murderer is a tragedy. But it is not a immoral.

Neat. None of that is genocide.

Well you're on a roll. "Championing." They're dead because their parents love Islam more than they love their children. They're dead because the leadership in Gaza, that's Hamas, has created an environment so unfathomably miserable by spending every penny the world has given them on tunnels and rockets and guns instead of food and shelter, that the idea of Islamic Paradise is more appealing than the idea of survival. They're dead because the overwhelming majority of Palestinian sentiment was elated by the rape and murder of other innocent children who have a different religion than theirs. They're dead because boys between the age of 12 and 17 were disproportionately likely to be holding an AK-47 when their life was ended by an Israeli strike. Show me one Israeli parade over those dead Palestinian children. Just one. Send me the recording of one Israeli man calling his parents in orgasmic elation because he had just murdered a Palestinian family. I don't think you're evil. I think you're highly emotional, and not intelligent enough to filter out the incredible deluge of propaganda and lies that you are exposed to. Unfortunately, they need you to think that I'm evil. Because if you were able to think clearly for more than 4 seconds, you would see the insanity of the things that you're posting here. You would stop and consider how the things you're suggesting have no historical precedent, and no basis in reality whatsoever. You would see that you're asking other people to accept the death of their innocent children in order to protect the innocent children of others who wish them nothing but annihilation.

No indirect involvement? That's like saying we had no indirect involvement with the Ukrainians fighting back Russia. Cute. The Iranians disagreed about the timing of the attack, not about the attack itself. They've spent billions on Hamas for years for exactly that type of attack. Some of you guys really are a trip. If I spent every day for the last few decades telling you that I was going to rape your wife and kill your kids, and then I rented the house next door and filled it with homeless people, and everyday you saw me and my friends going to that house to teach the homeless people how to rape women and kill children, with boxes of guns and fuzzy handcuffs every time I went there, I don't think you would be particularly confused as to what my intent was. I also don't think you would be dumb enough to call me a "rational actor." It's even funnier because you'll lose your mind over taking something Trump says literally, but when the regime chants Death to America in Friday prayers and in their schools... "Uhm, acktually, they're just doing what a rational actor in the region would be doing!' No, it's enough to make a gullible person less certain. It's remarkable how few Palestinians died in Gaza considering the absolute annihilation of the infrastructure. And I can't recall any history lessons about the Nazis, Bosnians, or Hutus calling every apartment complex they were about to attack warning the residents to flee. The only genocide in Gaza was a genocide of shitty concrete buildings and tunnels. Scholars indeed 🙄

This is amazingly ignorant. Exactly what part of October 7th was in Iran's rational interest? Addressing the rest of your post is pointless until we can establish if you truly believe that Iran is just another rational actor like the United States or Israel.

Buddy my job is literally to travel around the country and stay in different cities. Just because it happens sometimes in other cities doesn't mean there's a comparison. California has been orders of magnitude worse since the pandemic. And it's not even close.