Hyperreality

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I’m not trans. Occasionally posts from blahaj pop up in my feed, which is why I saw this one. I know this is blahaj, you’re probably all (justifiably) sick of what straight cis men think, so please take this comment with a huge pinch of salt.

Out of curiosity I read the gender dysphoria bible, it didn’t resonate at all. As a young child, my grandparents once had me wear a dress as a joke, it felt wrong and I couldn’t wait to take it off.

What I’m driving at is this: If what you and others read in the gender dysphoria bible resonates and if stuff like wearing a dress makes you feel ‘right’, please don’t doubt yourself. I’m pretty open about my sexuality, yet it doesn’t resonate. If it resonates with you, that means something.

These feelings are real. You deserve to be happy. Be kind to yourself and love yourself like you do your loved ones. I mean that literally, imagine if your best friend discovered they were trans. You’d want to be supportive, right? Be that for yourself.

1. I like that you included an archive link and media bias fact check link OP. Obviously, the latter isn’t without controversy, but it’s better than nothing.
2. It’s important that criticism is coming from a former Israeli PM and Biden. I know there are a lot of the people who are very critical of both or likely don’t think they’re going far enough, but because the former is Israeli and the latter has been vocal in his support of Israel, it’s far harder for Israel’s far right government and their supporters to discount that criticism. This is far more damaging than any protest march could be, especially if those participating in that martch have always been critical of Israel or can be painted as making excuses for Hamas or Iran.

Given America is likely to vote Trump as the next president, and his extensive ties to China, you’ll probably end up selling out the Taiwanese for a lucrative real estate deal for Dear Leader.

“we have lots of requests to interview Putin, he just doesn’t want to do it”

Because they’re actual journalists who would ask serious questions.

Not really. It sounds random, but the author of the article probably translated it from Celsius to begin with.

-4 F = -20 Celsius.

Potiomkin villages” (and subsequently Potiomkin anything eg. Potiomkin AI).

Potemkin village:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Apparently the original story is largely a myth:

… the tale of elaborate, fake settlements, with glowing fires designed to comfort the monarch and her entourage as they surveyed the barren territory at night, is largely fictional. … “Based on the above said we must conclude that the myth of ‘Potemkin villages’ is exactly a myth, and not an established fact.” … The close relationship between Potemkin and the empress could have made it difficult for him to deceive her. Thus, if there were deception, it would have been mainly directed towards the foreign ambassadors accompanying the imperial party … it is possible that the phrase cannot be applied accurately to its own original historical inspiration. According to some historians, some of the buildings were real, and others were constructed to show what the region would look like in the near future, and at least Catherine and possibly also her foreign visitors knew which were which.

Have you ever considered that if people were less naive about the true nature of war, and didn’t lie to themselves about the reality for civilians, and that war inevitably devolves into rape, torture, and infanticide, the world would be a better place?

You be better.

I am not being disingenious. I am being realistic.

Any bomb dropped on Gaza is a bomb dropped on a high populous area.

Some estimate that as many as ten million people died in the Congo Free State. Historians generally agree that what happened doesn’t meet the 1948 UN definition of genocide, because it requires intent and intent is hard to prove.

Another example: the Dasht-i-Leili Massacre. A US allied war lord stuffed thousands Taliban prisoners into metal containers, up to 250 per container. American troops were present when it happened. Oopsie doodle. It got a bit hot in the metal containers. It is likely that up to 2000 of them died from heat exhaustion and/or suffocation (and the occasional bullet). No one was ever convicted.

Remember former defense secretary Colin Powell? His meteoric rise started after he helped white wash the My Lai massacre.

Remember that time US soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists and laughed about it? Good news: they convicted someone for that. Bad news: they convicted the person who leaked the footage, Chelsea Manning.

This is how the world works. This is the standard of behaviour you can expect from militaries.

Which is probably why the Israelis will eventually get away with their crimes, just as other countries have before them. They can simply claim they were attempting to bomb Hamas, and that all those who have died are collateral damage. Don’t get your hopes up about the ICJ case. The fact that they didn’t push for an immediate cease fire should be enough to convince you of that. The world isn’t fair.

On a related note: the police are less nice than their portrayal in Brooklyn 99 would lead you to believe.

Sorry. But you’re naive.

War has always been like this. It’s just been masked by newspeak. Collateral damage, precision or surgical strikes, insurgent, non-combatants, etc.

IRC the initial bombings of Iraq in 2003, labeled ‘Shock and Awe’ and portrayed as surgical and precise by plenty of media, likely cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. The US bombed hospitals, they killed journalists, there were literal concentration camps, systematic torture, summary executions, etc. etc. People have simply watched too many American war movies (not a good war movie like Come and See, link to the full movie with subs on an official channel), don’t know much about international law, and seem to think a bomb blast stops at the window of a building. The sad reality is that you can bomb a building with one terrorist in it, and if it happens to be next to a children’s hospital, that’s invariably not considered a war crime.

IRC the UK Department of Defense even has absurdly low civilian casualty figures, because anyone in a combat zone is no longer considered a civilian. Here’s a relevant article:

The UK has admitted causing only one civilian death in its nearly decade-long campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a position widely criticised as implausible by defence establishment insiders and the civil service.

And let’s not get started on countries like Russia where officers pimped out their own soldiers. If that’s how they treat their own, you don’t want to know how they treat the enemy. I mean, they decided to pardon child rapists and murders after setting them loose on the Ukrainian front. And don’t get me started on wars with child soldiers and rape camps. Hell, IRC in Syria the red cross/crescent gave Assad the location of hospitals, so they could avoid bombing them. They stopped doing that when they realised the regime was almost certainly using the locations they provided as targeting data and hit multiple hospitals in a day.

Want to know the sad reality? Israel will likely get away with all this, because what they’re doing isn’t that especially out of the ordinary when it comes to war. It’s no coincidence that the ICJ stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Housing which is shit and often unsuitable for habitation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project

And to be clear, they’ve built a lot of infrastructure, but it’s often underbuilt. Eg. they’ll build huge projects or even residential districts, but save money by not ensuring there’s sufficient drainage. Result: fancy stadium, looks better than many a western stadium, cost less to build, fancier, looks higher quality, what you see may even be better quality, built in record time, but when it rains everyone’s walking in poo water.

I admire your confidence.

Nitpick, but a storage tank isn’t the best target.

IRC it’s the distillation tower. Those can take months to get running again, especially now that Russia is under sanctions and can’t easily source some specialised parts.

A storage tank is relatively easy to manufacture and replace.

I’ve provided further sources here:

https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/809321/-/comment/4963666

And another user has provided sources here:

https://lemmy.ca/comment/6965014

Please note that Biden not liking Netenyahu or his government, is different to Biden being supportive of the current war cabinet or Israel itself.

There are legitimate reasons to be critical of the US stance on that.

Have you ever considered that you don’t know that much, which is why you think what the democrats are doing is easy to understand and simple, and seem to think Israel, Netenyahu and his government are all the same thing?

Here’s an article from before the Hamas attacks:

The White House has finally invited Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the US after months of snubbing the Israeli prime minister over his government’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and deepening oppression of the Palestinians.

And another one:

President Biden bluntly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he “cannot continue down this road” … he touched off the kind of response usually expressed by America’s adversaries rather than its allies. … “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Wednesday, accusing the U.S. president of meddling in another country’s politics — which is exactly what Mr. Biden was intending to do. It was a remarkably public outbreak of the kind of disagreement that usually takes place in private. But there were other factors at work that had been brewing for many years.

And here’s another relevant article:

Biden understands that Netanyahu’s position is a precarious one. His governing coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote, and took power only because of a quirk of the Israeli electoral system. The coalition relies on an alliance of unpopular far-right parties to stay afloat, whom Netanyahu must appease to remain in office. Biden has exploited this weakness and repeatedly poked at it. Rather than directly confronting Netanyahu, he has called out his extremist partners and in this way heightened the contradictions within Netanyahu’s coalition, undermining its stability and gradually eroding its support in the polls. In July, Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Netanyahu’s government has “the most extremist members of cabinets that I’ve seen” in Israel … This was Biden’s approach in action: criticizing Israel during wartime in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and doing so in a way that nonetheless denied Netanyahu any opening. As long as it’s Biden versus Ben-Gvir, rather than Biden versus Bibi, the president holds the upper hand. … Biden has brought the same strategy to bear on the issue of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has accelerated under the cover of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Netanyahu’s coalition is unable to clamp down on these extremists and their terrorism because it is beholden to these extremists. But most Israelis have no desire to mortgage the security of Israel and its indispensable relationship to the United States in favor of some far-flung hilltop settlers in West Bank regions that few Israelis could locate on a map. Knowing this, Biden has begun unrolling a series of unilateral measures intended to raise the price of settler violence and pit Netanyahu and his allies against the Israeli public.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/biden-netanyahu-geopolitics-israel-hamas-war/676357/

Proper nasty politics, keep your enemies closer, and backstabbing basically.

People think Biden’s this old incompetent coot, but there’s a reason he’s been around for decades. He’s a piece of work, for better or for worse, and knows how the game is played.

Obviously plenty of people on social media have been shitting on Biden for a while now, perhaps understandably.

But this is why he has to play a delicate and balanced role. He obviously hates Netenyahu and dislikes Israel’s government, but he can’t push too hard, because it would only help Netenyahu cling on to power a while longer. For example:

After cautious criticism by Biden, Netanyahu rallies Israel’s right wing … The spat was cheered by Netanyahu’s supporters, who dismiss any calls from Biden or other leaders to pull back from the military assault on Gaza until Hamas has been wiped out as a fighting force.

So although he initially publicly backed Israel 100%, the reason he’s now being relatively muted in his criticism of their government, is almost certainly because he wants Netenyahu gone or wants Netenyahu to be forced to create a new coalition with more moderate parties. You know, get rid of those smug thunder cunts Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

Meanwhile, the US is clearly pushing the two state solution hard behind the scenes. Don’t think it’s an accident that little America’s David Cameron said the UK might recognise Palestine and apparently the US is considering it too, all while doing an intensive tour of the middle-east and negotiating with Israel’s neighbours for normalisation.

This isn’t an open war.

It’s a limited amount of retaliatory and proportional strikes, meant to dissuade further attacks on US forces and international shipping. They’ve also chosen not to attack Iran, exactly because they want to avoid escalation. They also warned Iran ahead of time, so they could move out anyone important.

If the US hadn’t responded, it would only have made things worse. You can’t just ignore groups murdering your soldiers. That’ll only invite more of this crap. Terrorists shooting at civilian container ships is also not good for anyone.

The same thing happened with Iran and Pakistan recently. Iran struck Pakistan. Pakistan struck back. They both came to the conclusion they didn’t want a war, and made a statement to that effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Per capita the US spends up to four times as much as comparable developed countries on healthcare, countries which often have something approaching universal healthcare which is affordable for almost everyone.

In other words, the US could spends less on healthcare, more on defense, and still have universal and better healthcare.