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wildcat09

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by wildcat09

  1. My best guess is a little of everyone's speculation: Iran probably prodded Hamas' leaders to do something that could fuck up the diplomatic goings on between SA and Israel, Hamas' leaders probably ordered its guys in Gaza to do this (not thinking they'd have the "success" that they've had), and it only worked so well for them because Israel ignored the obvious warning signs. It's not some gotcha. Shit gets misreported all the time during conflicts for good and bad reasons, so I think it's important to note when shit turns out to be inaccurate.
  2. The "beheaded babies" story doesn't seem to be accurate per the latest from the IDF (posted it in the other thread). That obviously doesn't mean Hamas hasn't killed babies and it may have been started as an honest mistake rather than an attempt to exaggerate Hamas' atrocities. This kind of shit happens all the time and sometimes it's propaganda and sometimes it's not. But I think it's important to note when stories like that turn out to be inaccurate.
  3. My guess is Rex getting revenge after his little tantrum yesterday.
  4. There's probably 400 airport books with roughly that plot.
  5. Yeah, there’s much better sources available than assholes like him and Ben Shapiro.
  6. I've mentioned before how much serious thought and effort some of the craziest conspiracy theorists will put into rationalizing their beliefs. This is a different context obviously, but this is a good illustration of what I mean. Icono has put more time into rationalizing and aligning all of his various and conflicting racial anxieties and hatreds than the biggest nerds have put into playing Skyrim or Zelda, and the output of all of that effort is this kind of completely deranged nonsense.
  7. Yes. Except for him. He has a speshul brain.
  8. Still simping for Elon, huh? Bless your heart.
  9. Nobody in the history of the world has ever thought "I'm one of the good ones and they'll see that and let me stay" harder than Icono does. That dude just keeps buying more and more leopards and he keeps training them to attack brown folks, and despite all of us repeatedly pointing it out he can't even conceive of the possibility of those leopards attacking him when he lets them off the leash.
  10. Alright, you’re the first one that has to leave though.
  11. It'll really be incredible if everyone in Israel is just so tired of his shit that he can't even use this situation to rally support.
  12. Guys don't be mean. I'm really interested in his opinions on these issues that he clearly thinks are important.
  13. I would very much like your takes on Biden voluntarily cooperating with this investigation and Trump's refusal to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.
  14. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/ With a little more digging, I'm sure we can find plenty of examples of other hard-right politicians in Israel expressing the same thoughts. But long before they began openly admitting it, the fact that Likud and Hamas had common interests and were aligned against peace was still obvious: Not long after that, Rabin was assassinated by a Netanyahu supporter.
  15. Another aside, and something that pales in significance to what's currently happening, but it wasn't long ago that the IDF assassinated an American journalist in the West Bank. You know, much like the Saudis did just a couple of years before that. That type of fucking brazenness is the sort of thing you see from the worst, most arrogant fucking people in the world. Netanyahu really is no better than Putin or MBS. The Israeli people deserve better than that piece of shit and his fascist allies.
  16. Not really. From Haaretz: Other examples of Netanyahu and other Likud members openly saying this can be found too, this was just the most accessible. They weren't just assholes pursuing a counterproductive strategy, they were intentionally empowering and emboldening Hamas because they knew it'd be fatal to efforts to achieve a two state solution, because they've never wanted one any more than Hamas has. Maybe Brisket is right that the majority of Palestinians would refuse to co-exist. I don't think he is, but given the conditions they've been forced to live under, I don't exactly disbelieve it either. But, and I really need to note this again, the median Palestinian age is fucking 19. In Gaza it's 18 (and for males in Gaza it's 17). We are talking about a population of roughly 5 million people, half of whom are children. Half of all Palestinians have spent quite literally their entire lives suffering from truly horrific, unimaginable oppression and violence and taught by Hamas to hate Jews. And this is an outcome that Israel's right wing government wanted and helped engineer. They ensured that there would be no moderate voices. Meanwhile, they've been priming their own supporters to support and even demand genocide (much as our right wing is doing here). And they've had a lot of success there. Already, back in 2021, Israeli far-right groups carried out their own mini-kristallnacht against Arab Israelis: Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same coin. As a bit of an aside, I also think there is good reason to think that what many Palestinians say when asked and what they would actually do if given a real opportunity to coexist peacefully with Israelis would be different. Under current conditions, it's easy when primed to say something shitty and I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas violently "encouraged" those types of responses to journalists. But if they were offered a real opportunity at a better alternative, I think most would take it. I mean c'mon, if the fuckin Irish could make peace with England anything is possible.
  17. Another aspect that I'm sure everyone sort of knows but hasn't fully thought about is that a bank isn't just one person or one group of people all united in the same goal. In one sense, it's pretty obviously accurate to say that the Trump's lenders weren't really defrauded, as they didn't actually rely on Trump's bullshit representations. But in another sense, they very much were. Modern banks are nothing like banks were 100 years ago. These are massive financial institutions with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees that play multiple pivotal roles in our financial system. Obviously everyone knows that they lend money. When we say that the lenders obviously weren't defrauded, we're thinking of the banks as being synonymous with their bankers. But a bank is not just its bankers. Modern banks in many respects also serve a quasi-regulatory function. All of our largest banks have compliance staffs that number in the thousands. They don't exist to help the bank make money, they exist to make sure the bank's own employees (which often includes officers and directors) aren't skirting or flagrantly breaking the rules to make more money. Which is a huge problem because that's something bankers do all the goddamned time, because they're incredibly incentivized to do so. But the bankers' short term gain poses long term risks to the bank itself, and as the rulebreaking accumulates the risk to the entire system increases exponentially. We've seen this happen repeatedly and in response we've imposed a lot of quasi-regulatory functions on banks. And if you think of these banks in that role, they absolutely got defrauded by Trump (and by their own bankers). If anyone is interested, ALAB podcast has a great episode on all the various shenanigans Deutsche Bank assholes did to skirt applicable rules so that they could get and keep Epstein's business after it was known he was a child trafficking piece of shit. They may be the worst of the worst, but the sort of shit their bankers did was far from unusual in the industry.
  18. The state of New York has a good reason to adopt more remedies than other states, including civil remedies, given that an enormous amount of all of the world's financial transactions take place within its jurisdiction. Few people in Wyoming give a fuck about maintaining the stability of our national and global financial systems. A whole lot of people in New York do.
  19. Yeah, it's not hard to understand that the harm is systemic. Lenders knowingly aiding and abetting their borrower's fraud to skirt regulations obviously increases systemic risk in the financial system. Any one instance you can easily rationalize away as not being a big deal but when you enable a culture of rampant fraud 2008 is what happens.
  20. Half of the people living in Gaza right now weren't even born or were literal infants the last time Palestinians had an election.
  21. No, they won't. That tail has been wagging this dog for quite awhile now.
  22. If it makes you feel better to imagine I said something I didn't say, I guess keep at it.
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