I find it interesting that more people don't ask themselves, if X country is "bad", why do they support Y country that is "good"?
Example- Americans who still support Ukraine. Mostly Democrats. They don't support Israel. But since 10/7/23, Russia has made far more gestures in support of Palestinians than Israel. Apparently the corporate media explains this away by invoking Russian "dependence on Iran", which literally makes no sense, although I confess I couldn't bear reading the propaganda on that one.
Conservatives were very quick to see the scam of Ukraine and funding Ukraine. Funny that the Republicans, often smeared as white supremacists by Democrats, are the ones correctly calling out US support for Nazis in Ukraine. While the Democrats ... well you get the point.
I have learned during these past two years that every country I was raised to hate and look down on is a country that organizes their economy for the good of the people. Sure some do this more than others, but every single demonized country has nationalized at least some of their "national" resources, which fills their treasuries with money they spend on improving their citizens' lives.
It's just interesting how the contradictions grow stronger every day. And people's material conditions get worse every day.
We live in exciting times. Sad, scary times, but very exciting times for the masses of humanity.
Yes. But far more likely that they hit one of our 900+ military bases.
There have been some interesting stories lately. One that really had me curious was a report that 3 US military were injured on the Gaza pier (or in a boat moored to it.)
The report said one person sprained an ankle.
Why in the heck is this a news story? Or rather, what lie is being set up with this news story? I don't recall a sprained ankle being newsworthy in the past.
Glenn Greenwald had some great lines about that in "Biden humiliated" episode
So much like that bridge in Baltimore- like, do not tell me a ship is heavy so that is why the whole bridge fell into the water. No, the corruption made them build a shitty bridge that ended up killing workers.
Bridges and piers don't just fall into the water! Only when constructed with $500 hammers.
I find it strange that William Pfaff should in 2012 ask what Israel wanted to do with the Palestinians.
That question was definitively answered even before 1948, but put into action that year for everyone to see: get rid of Palestinians either through eviction or elimination and that process has been proceeding ever since. It is the basis of Zionism.
While it is satisfying to think of things as simple intolerance of the other as the Star Trek episode does, in fact conflict is hardly ever a case of two equal sides with equally legitimate claims going at each other just because they are different.
I think we can all agree that no matter how terrible was the holocaust, no matter how injured one party might be, that party cannot go elsewhere to evict a group that had nothing to do with the terrible offense. That is precisely the case with the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Zionists declared a foreign land should be theirs exclusively even before the holocaust, as a result of European antisemitism that had nothing to do with the Arabs in Palestine or elsewhere. Because Judaism was practiced in Palestine thousands of years ago in no way legitimizes the complete expulsion of those who live there today because they are not Jews.
While many will talk of how Israel is a necessity for Jews to be safe, Americans, Jewish or not, know that it is absurd because of the lived experience here. The explosion of accusations of antisemitism in the US is entirely a pro-Israel red herring fully supported with big money. We are getting no news of any Jews being attacked in the US, yet Netanyahu is telling us the US is Germany in 1938. Does anyone believe this nonsense?
Israeli is now building a worldwide opposition to it that cannot be defended with all the American weaponry that exists. The pen and voice of diplomacy just might prove to be mightier than the sword. Zionism is revealed for the ugly project it always has been. The one and only reason that Israel has been able to last 76 years is the sympathy that came from the holocaust combined with the Palestinians being nobodies to the West. Were Israelis not Jews, but another other group that had not suffered the holocaust, the ethnic cleansing would have been denounced from the start. In fact Zionism was faltering before WW2 and even afterward the Jews who survived overwhelmingly wanted to go to the US, not Palestine.
There is such a thing as right and wrong and nothing is ever as simple as what Star Trek presented, which was an abstraction from reality, not an example of it. The real answer to human conflict is to never let one group gain great power over another. The lesson of the United States and its creation, the UN, is that a universal body is helpless if a member of that body has enough power to prevent anything that universal body might do in the name of justice.
Might making right is THE issue we have to deal with. The UN, by the original American design, cannot deal with it. For Americans, having the most might, we have seen the result of our unchecked power over and over again, now outrageously endorsing the great might of Israel against a helpless population that dares to resist and is slaughtered for doing so.
Did you see Nikki Haley is in Israel signing American bombs with "Finish them! America loves Israel." This from a person who considers herself presidential material in the land of liberty and justice for all. Talk about black is white and white is black! America has completely inverted what the founding fathers intended. And so many do not see this but revel in it, like Haley.
Clif, You stated: "The real answer to human conflict is to never let one group gain great power over another."
The ONLY way to accomplish that is to significantly reduce to the point of elimination the power that Governments have over their Citizens, thus reducing the power of those who own, operate, command, and control the politicians, bureaucrats, and appointees who run that Government.
How often has it been said by some government, "we have no argument with the people of country X, it is with their leaders that we disagree" when really means the issue is about power, not people.
How often have people said to each other, "if only we could bypass our governments, we could get along with the people of X" backing up what you say in your comment. But a problem of humanity is that those who love power are always the ones to make their way to the positions of power they crave and then, as we've seen over and over again with our own government, forget about living breathing human beings and obsess over which powerful party in the world is the most powerful. We (that means GWB, Cheney and the neocons) just HAD to get rid of Saddam Hussein, no matter how many Iraqis needed to die in the process, or American troops for that matter.
FINISH THEM! says Nikki, lover of power, as if she were speaking of a infestation of termites.
Thinking about it further, Clif, one is inevitably led to ask:
What is the difference between what the Jews and their Zionists have done in and to the People, Land, Country, and Nation of Palestine, and what the ostensibly "Christian" European Empires of Spain, Portugal, France, England, Germany, Belgium, Holland, etc etc etc did in Africa, the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America, India, Indochina, and, of course, the Middle East even before the Zionists came along with their Jews.
And all that was before the United States came along and got into The Game.
No difference at all jg, except that the Jews who are Zionists had the holocaust to cover for what they did. That is no justification though Zionists would say it is. To them the lesson of history (which ignores the situation of Jews in the US) is that by definition Jews will always be a target and the only way to keep the world at bay is to arm up and pre-empt. That is their MO and we have seen it practiced repeatedly over the history of Israel. That is why there is so much Israeli pride in their military - it is the living repudiation of being defenseless and ready to be victimized as were European Jews in the 1930's. This explains Netanyahu's continual statements that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. He sees it as incapable of immorality because it is what he believes is the only thing that stands between Jews and extermination. One could say to him the IDF wears the uniform of morality.
The psychological cost of the holocaust has been epic. To the Zionist "never again" refers only to Jews and Israel is the one and only preventative of a repeat. Therefor, whatever the IDF does is righteous. This seems absurd and astounding to us, but not to most Israelis.
The only way to look at all of the things you mentioned is from the standpoint of the victim, the one who is being attacked. That is why this new American idea of pre-emption cannot be allowed. If one is attacked then there is reason to defend, but attacking first and calling it defense allows anything...for any power to claim victimhood ahead of being an actual victim. It is a self-serving invitation for might to make right. WW2 destroyed the idea of responding only to attack, because it blinded too many Americans into believing we are inherently righteous and can spot evil infallibly. How quickly was Hitler's method of striking first adopted!
In this way Americans and Israelis are similarly blind, both believe themselves incapable of doing wrong simply because of who they are. It is no accident that the two peoples can believe they are a team warding off evil. In the crazy things Netanyahu says he voices the truth from the Zionist perspective.
In that perspective, Jews are always at the gates of Auschwitz, preventing it from being reopened. The rest of the world is more or less Nazi, including the Palestinians, and that viewpoint, that blindness to reality, is the undoing of Israel we see happening before our eyes.
You've hit on the episode I've always thought to be the most daring, politically charged, and relevant to the U.S., Bill. It's an absolutely scathing commentary on the racism prevalent here at that time, and still ongoing. It's quite brilliant, IMO.
But yes, it's applicable anywhere there's discrimination. From my lifelong reading, I understand that the continual turmoil in the Middle East stems from religious/tribal differences that have existed for millennia, regardless of similar (Semitic) heritage. For example, look at the Sunnis and Shi'as, forever fighting to the death over the legacy of Mohammed (not to say that Christian sects don't have equally....questionable.... differences). My rambling point being that, yes, that Star Trek episode really drives it home that people share an unequivocal, fundamental sameness, and fighting over superficialities is ultimately SELF-destructive.
as a scholium to your insights and instructive remarks, denise, it might be propitious at this nexus to inject my son kavan{augh}'s and son maine's remarks, respectively, regarding matthew hoh's inenarrable memorial-day hortation:
"Very moving speech from matthew hoh. I would liked to have heard it in person. There’s an interesting periodicity to war: the horrors and costs of war eventually become so intolerable that a measure of peace takes over once the fires dwindle. Nobody wants to see it ever again. But then that generation passes, tensions and competition rise, and the new generation underestimates the brutality and deprivation waiting at the crest of the rising tide of conflict. And so they surge forward, once again blindly."[kavan{augh}].
"Very poignant; I cried while reading it. Matthew Hoh's searing reflection on the personal and societal costs of war impugn not just the cold-hearted political calculus, corporate greed and benighted tribalism behind war, but also the double-edged sword that is our mythmaking. We urge to partake of heroic fantasies, of "noble sacrifices" in the triumph of "good over evil", but the mind's imaginative ability to project and abstract and mythologize makes this urge so dangerous as we collectively cast the mythic veil over the physical acts that are, in their starkest terms, senseless mass slaughter." [maine].
I have been hearing more about the West wanting to widen the war between Ukraine and Russia in order to blunt the news coming from Gaza (hence things like the strikes on the early warning radar systems in Russia). The West believes Russia will back down if the threat level rises high enough. They are wrong, because Russia isn't going to stop, no matter what the West does. We have backed Russia into a corner, but Russia is going to make sure that they complete the objectives of the SMO. Now Trump says he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing, right after he said he would not be threatening WWIII like Biden is.
Yeah, as soon as Trump changed his tune on Ukraine I thought, he's been chosen and approved as the winner. All these trials are just extreme theater, because any look at the facts.... a 5 year old could see this for what it is. (Bullshit politics)
One thing that the America/Israel War on Palestinians in Gaza did, for sure, was take America's Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine off the front pages, evening news, and blogosphere.
My bet is that the planned, programmed, and pending War with China in East Asia will ~ when most convenient ~ take everybody's attention off both Gaza and Ukraine. At least for a while.
We must try to connect these wars.
I find it interesting that more people don't ask themselves, if X country is "bad", why do they support Y country that is "good"?
Example- Americans who still support Ukraine. Mostly Democrats. They don't support Israel. But since 10/7/23, Russia has made far more gestures in support of Palestinians than Israel. Apparently the corporate media explains this away by invoking Russian "dependence on Iran", which literally makes no sense, although I confess I couldn't bear reading the propaganda on that one.
Conservatives were very quick to see the scam of Ukraine and funding Ukraine. Funny that the Republicans, often smeared as white supremacists by Democrats, are the ones correctly calling out US support for Nazis in Ukraine. While the Democrats ... well you get the point.
I have learned during these past two years that every country I was raised to hate and look down on is a country that organizes their economy for the good of the people. Sure some do this more than others, but every single demonized country has nationalized at least some of their "national" resources, which fills their treasuries with money they spend on improving their citizens' lives.
It's just interesting how the contradictions grow stronger every day. And people's material conditions get worse every day.
We live in exciting times. Sad, scary times, but very exciting times for the masses of humanity.
And should Trump ever get in the position where he could "bomb Moscow and Beijing," one can only wonder where he'll be when the buttons get pushed.
A good guess is that he'll be at some Podiatrist's office seeking another Deferment for chronichly
recurrent Bonespurs.
If not Brainspurs.
Just read this headline in today's online WSJ: "Blinken Signals U.S. May Allow Ukraine to Strike Inside Russia With American Weapons"
Stop and think about that for a moment, folks.
Does that mean that Russia could ~ with every and all justification ~ strike inside the United States with Russian weapons?
Yes. But far more likely that they hit one of our 900+ military bases.
There have been some interesting stories lately. One that really had me curious was a report that 3 US military were injured on the Gaza pier (or in a boat moored to it.)
The report said one person sprained an ankle.
Why in the heck is this a news story? Or rather, what lie is being set up with this news story? I don't recall a sprained ankle being newsworthy in the past.
They [the media] are just doing dress rehearsals for when the live-fire casualties start to happen, Rachel.
Probably around the time that $320+++MILLION so-called "Relief Dock" gets back in operation.
OMG THAT DOCK!!!
Glenn Greenwald had some great lines about that in "Biden humiliated" episode
So much like that bridge in Baltimore- like, do not tell me a ship is heavy so that is why the whole bridge fell into the water. No, the corruption made them build a shitty bridge that ended up killing workers.
Bridges and piers don't just fall into the water! Only when constructed with $500 hammers.
Just remember, Rachel: The MICC will continue to make lots and lots of money building things like that Dock for as long as there is an MICC.
And it will particularly continue to make lots and lots of money repairing and/or replacing the things that it built that failed.
I find it strange that William Pfaff should in 2012 ask what Israel wanted to do with the Palestinians.
That question was definitively answered even before 1948, but put into action that year for everyone to see: get rid of Palestinians either through eviction or elimination and that process has been proceeding ever since. It is the basis of Zionism.
While it is satisfying to think of things as simple intolerance of the other as the Star Trek episode does, in fact conflict is hardly ever a case of two equal sides with equally legitimate claims going at each other just because they are different.
I think we can all agree that no matter how terrible was the holocaust, no matter how injured one party might be, that party cannot go elsewhere to evict a group that had nothing to do with the terrible offense. That is precisely the case with the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Zionists declared a foreign land should be theirs exclusively even before the holocaust, as a result of European antisemitism that had nothing to do with the Arabs in Palestine or elsewhere. Because Judaism was practiced in Palestine thousands of years ago in no way legitimizes the complete expulsion of those who live there today because they are not Jews.
While many will talk of how Israel is a necessity for Jews to be safe, Americans, Jewish or not, know that it is absurd because of the lived experience here. The explosion of accusations of antisemitism in the US is entirely a pro-Israel red herring fully supported with big money. We are getting no news of any Jews being attacked in the US, yet Netanyahu is telling us the US is Germany in 1938. Does anyone believe this nonsense?
Israeli is now building a worldwide opposition to it that cannot be defended with all the American weaponry that exists. The pen and voice of diplomacy just might prove to be mightier than the sword. Zionism is revealed for the ugly project it always has been. The one and only reason that Israel has been able to last 76 years is the sympathy that came from the holocaust combined with the Palestinians being nobodies to the West. Were Israelis not Jews, but another other group that had not suffered the holocaust, the ethnic cleansing would have been denounced from the start. In fact Zionism was faltering before WW2 and even afterward the Jews who survived overwhelmingly wanted to go to the US, not Palestine.
There is such a thing as right and wrong and nothing is ever as simple as what Star Trek presented, which was an abstraction from reality, not an example of it. The real answer to human conflict is to never let one group gain great power over another. The lesson of the United States and its creation, the UN, is that a universal body is helpless if a member of that body has enough power to prevent anything that universal body might do in the name of justice.
Might making right is THE issue we have to deal with. The UN, by the original American design, cannot deal with it. For Americans, having the most might, we have seen the result of our unchecked power over and over again, now outrageously endorsing the great might of Israel against a helpless population that dares to resist and is slaughtered for doing so.
Did you see Nikki Haley is in Israel signing American bombs with "Finish them! America loves Israel." This from a person who considers herself presidential material in the land of liberty and justice for all. Talk about black is white and white is black! America has completely inverted what the founding fathers intended. And so many do not see this but revel in it, like Haley.
Great comment, Clif. No, I didn't see that bit about Nikki Haley. So typical of the amoral monsters who want to lead us.
Clif, You stated: "The real answer to human conflict is to never let one group gain great power over another."
The ONLY way to accomplish that is to significantly reduce to the point of elimination the power that Governments have over their Citizens, thus reducing the power of those who own, operate, command, and control the politicians, bureaucrats, and appointees who run that Government.
Right you are.
How often has it been said by some government, "we have no argument with the people of country X, it is with their leaders that we disagree" when really means the issue is about power, not people.
How often have people said to each other, "if only we could bypass our governments, we could get along with the people of X" backing up what you say in your comment. But a problem of humanity is that those who love power are always the ones to make their way to the positions of power they crave and then, as we've seen over and over again with our own government, forget about living breathing human beings and obsess over which powerful party in the world is the most powerful. We (that means GWB, Cheney and the neocons) just HAD to get rid of Saddam Hussein, no matter how many Iraqis needed to die in the process, or American troops for that matter.
FINISH THEM! says Nikki, lover of power, as if she were speaking of a infestation of termites.
Thinking about it further, Clif, one is inevitably led to ask:
What is the difference between what the Jews and their Zionists have done in and to the People, Land, Country, and Nation of Palestine, and what the ostensibly "Christian" European Empires of Spain, Portugal, France, England, Germany, Belgium, Holland, etc etc etc did in Africa, the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America, India, Indochina, and, of course, the Middle East even before the Zionists came along with their Jews.
And all that was before the United States came along and got into The Game.
No difference at all jg, except that the Jews who are Zionists had the holocaust to cover for what they did. That is no justification though Zionists would say it is. To them the lesson of history (which ignores the situation of Jews in the US) is that by definition Jews will always be a target and the only way to keep the world at bay is to arm up and pre-empt. That is their MO and we have seen it practiced repeatedly over the history of Israel. That is why there is so much Israeli pride in their military - it is the living repudiation of being defenseless and ready to be victimized as were European Jews in the 1930's. This explains Netanyahu's continual statements that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. He sees it as incapable of immorality because it is what he believes is the only thing that stands between Jews and extermination. One could say to him the IDF wears the uniform of morality.
The psychological cost of the holocaust has been epic. To the Zionist "never again" refers only to Jews and Israel is the one and only preventative of a repeat. Therefor, whatever the IDF does is righteous. This seems absurd and astounding to us, but not to most Israelis.
The only way to look at all of the things you mentioned is from the standpoint of the victim, the one who is being attacked. That is why this new American idea of pre-emption cannot be allowed. If one is attacked then there is reason to defend, but attacking first and calling it defense allows anything...for any power to claim victimhood ahead of being an actual victim. It is a self-serving invitation for might to make right. WW2 destroyed the idea of responding only to attack, because it blinded too many Americans into believing we are inherently righteous and can spot evil infallibly. How quickly was Hitler's method of striking first adopted!
In this way Americans and Israelis are similarly blind, both believe themselves incapable of doing wrong simply because of who they are. It is no accident that the two peoples can believe they are a team warding off evil. In the crazy things Netanyahu says he voices the truth from the Zionist perspective.
In that perspective, Jews are always at the gates of Auschwitz, preventing it from being reopened. The rest of the world is more or less Nazi, including the Palestinians, and that viewpoint, that blindness to reality, is the undoing of Israel we see happening before our eyes.
Very well said, Clif. Thank You for sharing those thoughts. Lots to chew on there.
That's one of the Star Trek's best episodes. Local TV has been showing it, and "Bread and Circuses" with the 20th Century Romans, a lot lately.
I wonder why? Not.
You've hit on the episode I've always thought to be the most daring, politically charged, and relevant to the U.S., Bill. It's an absolutely scathing commentary on the racism prevalent here at that time, and still ongoing. It's quite brilliant, IMO.
But yes, it's applicable anywhere there's discrimination. From my lifelong reading, I understand that the continual turmoil in the Middle East stems from religious/tribal differences that have existed for millennia, regardless of similar (Semitic) heritage. For example, look at the Sunnis and Shi'as, forever fighting to the death over the legacy of Mohammed (not to say that Christian sects don't have equally....questionable.... differences). My rambling point being that, yes, that Star Trek episode really drives it home that people share an unequivocal, fundamental sameness, and fighting over superficialities is ultimately SELF-destructive.
as a scholium to your insights and instructive remarks, denise, it might be propitious at this nexus to inject my son kavan{augh}'s and son maine's remarks, respectively, regarding matthew hoh's inenarrable memorial-day hortation:
"Very moving speech from matthew hoh. I would liked to have heard it in person. There’s an interesting periodicity to war: the horrors and costs of war eventually become so intolerable that a measure of peace takes over once the fires dwindle. Nobody wants to see it ever again. But then that generation passes, tensions and competition rise, and the new generation underestimates the brutality and deprivation waiting at the crest of the rising tide of conflict. And so they surge forward, once again blindly."[kavan{augh}].
"Very poignant; I cried while reading it. Matthew Hoh's searing reflection on the personal and societal costs of war impugn not just the cold-hearted political calculus, corporate greed and benighted tribalism behind war, but also the double-edged sword that is our mythmaking. We urge to partake of heroic fantasies, of "noble sacrifices" in the triumph of "good over evil", but the mind's imaginative ability to project and abstract and mythologize makes this urge so dangerous as we collectively cast the mythic veil over the physical acts that are, in their starkest terms, senseless mass slaughter." [maine].
Incisive and perceptive thoughts, Jeanie, particularly with the nod to historical repetition.
Yes, exactly, Denise.
Very powerful clip. It actually gave me chills watching it. I still see Frank's Riddler though. 😅
I have been hearing more about the West wanting to widen the war between Ukraine and Russia in order to blunt the news coming from Gaza (hence things like the strikes on the early warning radar systems in Russia). The West believes Russia will back down if the threat level rises high enough. They are wrong, because Russia isn't going to stop, no matter what the West does. We have backed Russia into a corner, but Russia is going to make sure that they complete the objectives of the SMO. Now Trump says he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing, right after he said he would not be threatening WWIII like Biden is.
Yeah, as soon as Trump changed his tune on Ukraine I thought, he's been chosen and approved as the winner. All these trials are just extreme theater, because any look at the facts.... a 5 year old could see this for what it is. (Bullshit politics)
One thing that the America/Israel War on Palestinians in Gaza did, for sure, was take America's Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine off the front pages, evening news, and blogosphere.
My bet is that the planned, programmed, and pending War with China in East Asia will ~ when most convenient ~ take everybody's attention off both Gaza and Ukraine. At least for a while.
Palestinians are semitic, the others are occupiers.
What does that make Caucasians in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and North, Central, and South America?