I think the total number killed by Hamas rockets EVER is like 30 to 50. Might be a little off. It’s more about draining Israel’s money and putting up a show than anything else.

Hamas’s cited reason was that Israel was demanding female soldiers, while the terms of the “pause” dictated the exchange of civilians. It seemed like Israel simply wanted an excuse to continue bombing.

let’s be honest it’s because all the rape and torture would make their propaganda war tricky

Let’s be honest about this having no substantiation at present and being based on Israeli and U.S. State Dept propaganda. Honestly it’s disgusting how quickly people will resort to insinuations like this.

What’s the standard for this in the U.S.? It reaches only as far up the ladder as anyone can definitively prove. Abu Gharib saw like, what, a lieutenant fired or something. But when it’s “the enemy”, all of a sudden we assume by default the decision came from the highest levels, and it’s carte blanche to wipe out 2.5 million people living in a giant concentration camp, in a supposed attempt to do regime change.

Israel doesn’t care about their citizens, they’re carpet bombing Gaza and flooding tunnels they know the hostages are in. They had the option to just do a hostage exchange since day one. This is some mixture of annexation and Netanyahu trying to hold on to power.

It might be time for Israel to agree with the hostage exchange Hamas put forward a bunch of times and stop genociding the civilian population of Gaza.

Hamas killed 1200 with about 500 to 600 civilian deaths

Minus a few hundred Israel killed with “friendly fire”.

Including Montana.

Yes, the Wikipedia article you’re quoting goes on to state:

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities, launching its war effort.[24] Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt’s military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy.

You can shut up now tbph. Not responding further.

What’s the specific claim you’re making? Israel did in fact start that war, with a “preemptive” air raid meant to cripple Egypt’s air force. And the political history of the region doesn’t abrogate the right of its long-established inhabitants to the land - this is an Israeli propaganda talking point.

They did, that’s why it’s illegal now.

It’s not unlawful to take land during a war. It’s just shitty, in most instances.

It is illegal to take land during a war. Wiki:

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

How many beheadings have there been, versus the number of Muslim people who have ever lived?

Not sure I agree. I think many people who are “defeatist about voting” have observed that the surface-level differences between Democrats and Republicans (namely social issues and the more visible fascism from Republicans) just mask an underlying corporatist/fascist state that’s sacrosanct and immune from popular pressure and legislative change.

Re: “Obamacare” (which is just one tiny change mind you) - there were some marginal improvements like re: preexisting conditions, but mostly it seemed to increase compliance costs, my understanding is premiums have just continued rising and the fundamental issues causing healthcare scarcity and limiting competition have been made worse.

In effect, the bonds I mentioned are just inverted loans. The Treasury takes in $1k from payroll taxes for these programs, issues a bond to the trust fund saying “I owe you $1k plus interest”, spends the $1k on whatever (I guess primarily the discretionary budget) and eventually has to somehow generate money to pay it back with interest.

In terms of whether or not bonds were “borrowed” - this wouldn’t exactly matter in a meaningful sense, but I’m not clear this ever actually happened in the first place. There was some claim about, when the trust fund was mixed with the general fund 1968-1990, maybe the government took bonds out of the program, but you have to remember that inside the government, that’s not something of value, that’s just an obligation the government has to pay to itself, it’s a big nothing burger. The outstanding liabilities from Social Security to the actual beneficiaries (elderly people) exist regardless of how the government is doing their accounting internally.

Read any SS Trustees report. It doesn’t have “money”, it has debt instruments (bonds), which are essentially a document saying “we the government owe ourselves a thousand dollars”. You can print those all day, it’s only sourcing that money that has any kind of direct consequence (taxation, inflation, etc.).

And yes, that does raise an interesting question of, what did they do with the actual money we paid into the programs, if the only thing in the trust fund is bonds.

Social Security doesn’t have assets, it has debt obligations, which to the government, are something you can conjure out of thin air. The only senses in which it can “run out” is if outlays exceed receipts, or if it runs out of debt instruments to cash out and has to ask for a pile of more debt instruments.

“Godwin’s Law” only said that the comparison to Nazis becomes inescapable the longer a conversation goes (not the common interpretation “whoever says Nazi first loses”). If I remember right he actually went back later and said it’s perfectly fine to draw the Nazi analogy to fascist states.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/despite-bidens-doubts-humanitarian-agencies-consider-gaza-toll-reliable-2023-10-27/

The health ministry is a medical organization, regardless of being under Hamas rule.

Yeah, Hamas isn’t as bad as Israel, it’s literally a resistance movement to the people that ethnically cleansed their population from their land and kept them in a concentration camp for two decades. The unbalanced condemnation tbph is the result of a concerted Israeli/Western propaganda campaign to obscure the context and nature of the attacks, including the hundreds of Palestinian people killed in 2023 before Oct. 7, and more fundamentally, the fact that Israel has been keeping 2.4M people in a high-tech concentration camp for the last two decades.

The atrocity claims against Hamas from Oct. 7 have some serious evidentiary issues at this point, even including some unknown number of the civilian deaths being attributable to the IDF (literally firing at, shelling and bombing Israeli citizens - though to be clear, there is video of Hamas shooting civilians as well). You compare this to the inhuman genocide being levied against Palestinians now - food, water, electricity, fuel, medicine being cut off for 5 weeks at this point, likely upwards of 20,000 civilians killed, at least half of the buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed, attacks on hospitals, schools, refugee camps, ambulances, journalists, aid workers, without legitimate substantiation of their repurposing for military purposes - these are crimes against humanity. There is no equivalence here.

Maybe the U.S. upvoted that to discredit China /j