Europe as the "Sick Man" of the Globe, Mossad's 'Spectacular' Hezbollah Hit, Wilhelm Reich: Instigator of the Sexual Revolution, Fake 'Blue Zones", Walking Through the Faroes
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"Hezbollah, meanwhile, is reeling from the damage the attacks have delivered to its command and control systems..."
Not at all. Hezbollah does not depend on electronic devices for communication. They have a very sophisticated system of interconnecting tunnels which communicate via "runner". Typically this means a courier on a motorcycle. Speedy, secure, and untouchable. Hezbollah command and control is structured to handle situations like these. So no real damage to them was done. Although the Israelis did manage to dial up the hate-o-meter even further. Hezbollah devastated a Mossad building a few weeks ago, killing 22 and wounding over seventy. This stupid reprisal on their part will do nothing but guarantee an even more devastating attack on another Israeli base or intelligence asset. Israel is in shit up to its eyeballs.
Hezbo-celebrate all you want, when thousands of terrorists get their balls blown off it must effect that mob's morale. Not all the way to the point of near-humanity, btu still . . .
This must have been months? Years? In the planning.
You don't get pissed off on Monday and by Friday have infiltrated an international supply chain, make sure your victims have a need for new electronics and booby trap a particular batch that's bound for particular people.
Many years. Well before 2022. It's curious that they pulled the trigger now. It's like firing a gun with one bullet. They can't do it again. Israel is desperate to make their allies believe they are in charge of the escalatory ladder. They are not. Northern and central Israel is getting pounded by rockets as I write.
The Jews are in shit up to their eyeballs. It is a fight to the death for them, or so it seems to me.
The Muslim world hates them, and the progressive western world hates them: white oppressors.
I think it’s almost certain that Israel will fail as a state, and that the Jews will be once again cast asunder.
It’s demographics.
One day the Americans will stop supporting them. The Jewish lobby in America has done a spectacular job and should be congratulated. But ultimately the world wants to kill them. You seem like you would be happy to kill them, or maybe you just want them to stop killing Muslims?
I’m agnostic. Generally I don’t like people slaughtering each other but it seems that’s our way. Again, history seems to support this conclusion.
The only thing a deadman knows is - it’s better to be alive; Histories judgment, it’s better to be on the winning side.
As a nice little cosy Canadian, it’s not much more than a TV show for me.
Turbo America could very well ditch Israel. State Dep't would do so immediately if they could. Zionism incompatible with the latest iteration of woke messianic aggression that inspires US foreign policy. As Turbo America sinks into bankruptcy and squalor it will follow the example of the UK during the golden days of OPEC in the 70s. It will sell itself to Qatar and Iran. Jihadi networks already well-established in the US itself and the US (like France and UK) sees Hezbollah as a partner, while Israel is 'problematic'. The Turbo American infatuation with Islam and the Global South will enable Washington to reconnect with its anticolonial heritage. US was once a key influence/supporter of secular Arab nationalism, now it will champion Islamogauchiste politics on a global scale.
But so what? Israel is stronger now than it was between 1948-67. And the Levantine Arabs have a miserable track record geopolitically, the Palestinians especially. Things will get very uncomfortable for North American Jews, but Israel will quite likely do just fine.
You obviously know nothing about Hezbollah. They have a civil and a military component. 95% of the pagers/walkie-talkies were in the hands of the civil component. That means Mossad killed and maimed ambulance drivers, doctors, nurses, medical administration bureaucrats, and firemen (and their families). These were not soldiers. The military component communicate via fiber optic cable and couriers. Hezbollah is unleashing hell even deeper into Israel as a result. I'm sorry you only listen to regime media, because they are liars. One way or the other, the truth is going to hit you like a freight train in the months ahead. Israel cannot survive this because Hezbollah missiles and drones are stored and are launched from stores deep underground in the hills and mountains of southern Lebanon. Only nuclear weapons could affect these deeply buried assets. Israel is simply killing Lebanese civilians out of impotent rage. And do tell, where is the vaunted IDF invasion of Southern Lebanon? By the way, I have no dog in this fight. But people should at least make an effort to understand what is happening.
💩 lol 😂 yea Cosa Nostra had a civil component too. Then go join them, the Israeli geezers went and fought, your turn. I’ve been watching Hizb not in person but at the same distance as you for decades. They can give shelter to Gazans then, as that worked so well last time.
Go DIY, meanwhile we can stop stabbing people who trust us, in this case the Israelis.
Hizb initiated this round with Israel oct 8, on its own.
Israel is just shooting back.
They bring it on themselves, lose and come crying to the Internet left.
Like I said, instead of making personal attacks on people who don't share your bizarre notions, just watch Israel go down slowly in the coming year. It will be like watching someone drown very slowly.
"This incredible series of hits on Hezbollah these past few days do usher in a new phase in the conflict and threaten to unleash what we all know is an inevitable war: that being Israel and Hezbollah.
The war will be between the United States and its catamites and Hezbollah and Iran on the other side.
If Iran and Hezbollah refuse to take the bait, Israel simply will act more and more outrageously until they have no other choice, whereupon Israel will run screaming to its American thug.
I don't understand why Nord Stream is still not in use years after the attack. It's repairable and they only broke 3 out of 4 pipes.
This article makes the argument that the whole thing could have been staged to give a reason to screw Europe. Keep in mind that Ukraine is being paid by Russia to transit gas through their country, while they're at war. Hmmm
Total speculation here but I think Reich and his acolytes used his bat-shit crazy science as an excuse for pedophilia. And given the bat-shit crazy drag queen story hours, I'd say it's all the same thread.
Greek island of Ikaria is another alleged 'blue zone'. Boomers of course love this kind of thing, and it has
become a bit of a pilgrimage/field-research site for an increasing number of 'traveller not tourist' types of that generation..
While I can imagine that the sea air and dry earth of Ikaria engenders long life, Greeks (bless em) are by no means averse to getting everything they can out of their kleptocratic government. Ikaria is also a communist stronghold, so there's that too. Then there's the national tourism board, which, maybe trying to make lemonade out of lemons, promotes Ikaria as island of the long-lived.
“the liberation of the individual from the constraints of biology" - great synopsis. The "secret hidden force" aspect seemed to be progressivism's subconscious yearning for and [failed] attempt at an absolute (comparable to Teilhard's de Chardin's Omega Point?). Query if Bloom also influenced based upon his irl behavior which Bellow described in Ravelstein although the monism would be inconsistent with Maimonides (purported origin of esoteric elements of the Straussians).
I'm trying to visualize how Trump should try to counter the Iranians ayatollahs having as their motto "Death to America, Death to Israel" etc. Obama et al gave them a lot in sweetheart backroom deals with very few apparent strings attached, infuriating lots of Israelis and American Jews.
Trump's approach would be to say something like [picture Phil Hartman as a rambunctious Frank Sinatra], "What's with this 'Death to America' crap, Iran? What's with 'Death to Israel?' We want to love you and make great deals with you! Persian women are beautiful!"
Wilhelm Reich sounds like a Hollywood villain's name. There was that New Yorker article a few years back about how the West German government, literally in the name of fighting fascism, abducted children from families and sent them to live with serial child molesters.
Reich was a wackjob but I’d estimate his influence on the sexual revolution and the current decline in TFR at almost zero. Variety of technological and social factors much more decisive.
A cultural change this significant can’t happen without significant latent demand from society. Short of direct coercion by force, people can’t really be memed into doing stuff they don’t want to do. As it turns out, people just really like having consequence-free sex! Once the technology and economic structures enabled it, they didn’t need a Reich to show them how.
Not every churchgoer is a priest, and not every priest is a theologian, but the theology undergirds it all. No there is not a grand top-down conspiracy, but this aspect of communist revolutionary thinking pops up again and again. It's no accident that the dominant woke position now is "there's no such thing as parental rights", and they think the school should be able to trans your kid behind your back, it all fits into their revolutionary theology. It's not an accident that woke commies like to promote "family abolition"
I think "anti-family" is another term for "anti-humanity." These nihilists, including Black Lives Matter (which originally called for, on their website, the dissolution of the African-American family, as if the US government hadn't already gone far enough in destroying urban black families), have a lot to answer for.
I used to think that Western liberals hated Israel and opposed every step it ever takes to defend itself and its people—"How dare you blow the balls off hundreds of terrorists, they might have been standing close to a child! that's against the law!"—bc they are bigoted against Jews, but lately I've been thinking the opposite is true: Western liberals denounce Israel for harming a hair on a child's head while sweeping every Arab massacre and every deranged declaration of bloothirst by some frothing ayatollah under the rug bc they are actually deeply bigoted against Arabs.
Western liberals excused 10/7 as some kind of legitimate form of "resistance" bc they think there could never be an Arab Mandela or even a Gerry Adams, that the best they can muster is blind massacres and thus are completely incapable of attaining any civilized standard; they excuse every barrage of rockets and every declaration of Jew hate bc they have placed Arabs under the heading of Oppressed in their cosmology, meaning they are below responsibility and agency, that they can never do but only be done to; they absolutely ignore or excuse the fact that Hamas hides in schools, mosques and hospitals and that it teaches its children a level of Jew hate that would make Eichmann blush, because they consider this normal, understandable behavior, which they would abhor and denounce if any other people on the planet had become this ugly and degraded.
Western liberals think of the Palestinians as the angry retarded baby that lives next door and refuses to shut up, and Israel as the parent of this crazy kid who is always trying to burn the building down—please, Israel, can't you finally shut this kid up? I don't care if it slits your throat in the night, we just want some peace!
Western liberals have been the worst enablers of the Palestinian cause, meaning everything they say and do only makes life worse for the actual Palestinian people—if you refuse to hold people to a civilized standard, they will never become civilized. It's time to stop the bigotry and demand that the Palestinians dedicate themselves to peaceful coexistence, the same standard the West demands of every other tribe on earth.
Every other tribe on earth is allowed to arm themselves with whatever weapons they need to defend themselves against attack. This is a right that is Israelis have and the Palestinians do not.
I find this hypocrisy particularly egregious when coming from Americans who proclaim that even private citizens have the right to bear arms.
Arms, missiles, suicide vests, massacres—what has it gotten the Palestinian people? Gaza is rubble and in the WB they're ringed by the IDF, who can't turn their backs for a second.
Fine, let's imagine the Palestinians have tanks, planes, rocket launchers etc, what does that get them? More war, death, bloodshed, misery, much of it cheered on by the West, who treat all foreign conflicts as just a pretext to either preen about their morality or use it as fodder in a local political foodfight.
Since the 1948 Partition Plan, the Arabs have NEVER ONCE accepted the existence of the Jewish state, but instead launched multiple wars (all of which they lost), and when this failed, next came suicide bombers on buses and in restaurants. Israel offered them their own state in 2000 and 2008 (among other times), and were rejected each time, without even a counter-offer.
The only path forward for these people is to finally abandon their bloody fantasies of revenge and of erasing the "Zionist entity" and to commit themselves to peaceful coexistence. This would be a novelty for the Palestinians, but who knows they might even like it and it might even work—certainly plotting endless massacres and stewing in genocidal fantasies has only led to disaster.
That doesn't answer the more general question of who is entitled to weapons. My answer to that is everyone.
Weapons and the use of them is like their inverse, medicine, both are necessary for maintaining human life and must be obtained and obtained at the correct strength and applied at the right time and place.
I regard it as an axiom of both politics and nature that force can only be stopped by an opposing force of equal strength. This current war, which is of course only the latest phase of a war that has been going on for decades, will only end either when one side has totally destroyed the other (which would be a massacre of millions) or by both sides reaching parity.
The Palestinians are armed to the teeth -- What in the world are you talking about? Gaza itself is nothing but a gigantic Iranian military base. If the Gazan government had put the extraordinary amount of money they are stealing into developing Gaza, the place would be Singapore by now.
Hamas was directly funded by the Israeli government for years, senior military and intelligence officers have confirmed it. If it was a crime for Tehran to do it, then it was a crime for Tel Aviv to do it too.
Israel will condemn the acts it has explicitly done itself.
Read your literature. Israel always planned to cleanse the West Bank and Gaza. Even before the 1948 that was already being discussed among Zionists.
The strategy to block negotiations has always been the same: Israel asks just a bit more than the Palestinians are prepared to cede and then they accuse the Palestinians of blocking the negotiations. But whenever the Palestinians give in they can be sure that there will be additional demands. Netanyahu still is playing this game.
oh ive read the literature. always w the 1948, 1967, always excavating some grievance or finding some nefarious Jewish conspiracy. but what about 2024? what about today and tomorrow? when will the Palestinians grow up and commit to building their own nation instead of destroying another one?
and as far as the Palestinians' thoughts about peace and their approach to negotiations, don't listen to me, take it from the man himself.
ARAFAT to Oriana Fallaci:
We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles that we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers; second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic and military forms, and to drive it out of Palestine forever; third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state; fourth: this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders: to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.
FALLACI: Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.
ARAFAT: No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations.
Are you really surprised that the Palestinians initially wanted their land back that was stolen from them? Find me a person who is immediately prepared to compromise after he has been robbed.
You implicit suggestion is that if the Palestinians had been more flexible in 1948, 1965 or whenever they would have been in a better position. That is a big lie. They likely would have been in a worse position. Israel would have pocketed the concessions and then it would have continued with more robbery. That is what we saw happening after the Oslo Agreements.
"if the Palestinians had been more flexible in 1948, 1965 or whenever they would have been in a better position."
How could they be in a worse position?? Gaza is rubble and the WB has them ringed by the IDF, who cannot allow them freedom of movement, as the last time they did, "martyrs" blew themselves up on buses and in restaurants—anything to kill Jews.
The Palestinians have NEVER ONCE accepted the existence of the Jewish state, never once accepted a peace offer, never once even made a counter-offer, never once renounced violence and the goal of destroying Israel.
Perhaps in all recorded history no people have been worse-served by their supposed leadership than the Palestinians. When is it time to stop thinking about 1918 and 1948 and start thinking about 2025 or 2035? People who catalogue and fetishize the endless list of Palestinian grievances do them no favors.
The Palestinians accepted the existence of Israel in Oslo. And look what they got in return.
Hamas has adapted its program to prepare for a future agreement. But they won't recognize Israel unless they get an explicit commitment of Israel to a future Palestinian state.
I think that Western liberals all have unresolved authority issues. Most of them have been overprotected and pampered, so their rage against authority is not explicable as a result of childhood abuse (with a significant minority of exceptions, of course). Young activists are a huge part of the anti-Israel demographic. I think it is likely that they identify with the terrorists as enhanced versions of angry teenagers striking a blow against the adult establishment. Western kids are immersed in gaming and other online fantasy material to such a degree that it is more real to them than what is actually happening. Maybe they experienced Oct 7 as an enactment of an extremely attractive fantasy, in which their side triumphed in the most sadistic, gory game scenario imaginable. During the week after the terrorist attack on innocent Israeli civilians, local college students were complaining about the MSM airing news about the details of the attack. They construed this coverage as motivated by an intention on the part of the media to make their audiences "upset" and thereby increase their opposition to the "liberation struggle" of the Palestinians.
"Young activists are a huge part of the anti-Israel demographic. I think it is likely that they identify with the terrorists as enhanced versions of angry teenagers striking a blow against the adult establishment." 🎯
It's a short step from denouncing your parents for making you clean your room and be in bed by 11 to denouncing the adult world for failing to achieve peace, love and and the eradication of suffering; it's a short step from reading comic books and imbibing comic-book morality to believing that every conflict has a Hero and a Villain and your job is to assign their labels and act accordingly.
It's not a surprise or coincidence that there were things like the Hitler Youth, the Red Guard, or that Pol Pot's child soldiers were the most vicious. Young people have enormous passion and energy, which various unscrupulous opportunists are always happy to manipulate.
Vicious aggression and cruelty are obviously innate in our species, and when I was a child there was an oft repeated saying that “children are cruel.” It was assumed then that kids need to be trained to not be cruel, if they were to become civilized members of the community. When adults intentionally develop childrens’ innate cruelty, or even reframe cruelty as “kindness,” we end up where we are today.
All true, but beside the point IMHO. The Palestinians have been agents of chaos for a century. Every external power that wanted unrest backed the Palestinians one way or another. In the '30s and '40s it was Berlin, later the UK (in 1948 the UK opened its arms dumps to Arab forces and British officers led the only successful Arab forces, ethnically cleansing Jews from the West Bank), then the Soviets. Now Turbo America wants a Palestinian state, presumably to maintain a strategy of tension that will allow Washington to play games across the region. The messianic utopian imperatives of Wilsonian foreign policy (with all its attendant cynicism and delusion) are now channelled into oblique support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and even Hizbollah.
It won't work. Key Arab states have had enough. The Gulf rulers, Qatar being the exception, understand what it is all about. Israel is slowly but surely being integrated into the region. October 7 was a wake up call for the region, much like the Arab Spring. As I have said before, there would be plenty of people across the Arab world praying for Netanyahu, if only out of self-interest.
As for Western liberals, who cares? The West as a whole lacks agency, which cannot be purchased by financing NGO crisis actors. The Gazan war reveals the irrelevancy of the activist class and the people who use conflict tourism to generate synthetic identities. The substantial, underlying, forces cannot be controlled by rhetoric or wishful thinking distilled from ideologies prepared by fantasists and liars.
Western progressives are colourful and a great nuisance, but it is a mistake to focus on them. The ground is shifting under their feet on any number of levels.
Washington and London now host significant diasporas filled with jihadi supporters. This will inevitably lead to tragedy, but the US and UK will learn the lessons of Lebanon and Kuwait the hard way. Wider geopolitical factors are also coming into play: the erosion of popular support for the regime in Tehran, the rise of India, Eurasian economic integration, successful and sustainable development by secular regimes in Central Asia and moderation in the Gulf.
Ant-Zionism is a sink for negative psychoaffective energy but people who are destabilised by the issue are not going to get a say when and where it counts.
Westerners generally find the Middle East a challenge. Differences in language, culture and religion add up, as do the complexities of the cross-cultural interactions. This is amplified by the fact that the Levant is the most Western adjacent part of the region in terms of politics and culture and the most exposed to Western ideologies which have been adapted for local use, often very unhappily. Secular nationalism, revolutionary socialism, fascism all found supporters in the universities of Beirut and Damascus. The Westernised Levantines still build careers on playing games with all of this. Very lucrative in medua, academia or NGO land, wherever fantasy reigns supreme.
The Palestinians have the great misfortune of having a predatory and de,lusional leadership class. In the 19th century the Arab ruling class sold off land to foreigners, above all the Russian Orthodox Church (the biggest private landlord in Israel today) and the Zionist movement. The Palestinian leadership were out of their depth: corrupt, steeped in contempt for Jews, confident that they could negotiate with or even control external powers. They prioritised relationships with the British over the Jewish community. Huge mistake, repeated endlessly with the US, EU and UN today. They bank on a third party giving them a state. Also bank on Resistance Incorporated lasting forever.
Western liberals simply clueless, even more delusional than the Palestinians.
what a horrid symbiosis of enabling and infantilization, it's really akin to a junkie and their dealer.
the worst thing that can happen to any people is to become an international "cause"--not only does your actual life and its quality become irrelevant, but your leaders become graft junkies and your tears and misery become valuable commodities to be sold to various opportunists, grifters and camera whores. The Palestinians are just the latest stick crafted to beat the Jews with and if they over kick their crippling addiction to hate, envy and bloodthirst maybe they can achieve some type of normalcy.
The Palestinians can opt for alternatives any time they like. There are other Arabs that have done that and plenty more moving towards the same.
My guess is that the Palestinian diaspora in the West will collect the rent from radical chic in perpetuity, the Palestinians of Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza will head like lemmings off whatever cliffs are in view while many, possibly most, of the Arab Israelis quietly give thanks for the mixed blessings that have come from living under a Zionist regime.
The West, however, is in for extremely serious trouble. Having dismissed, misinterpreted or ignored the legacy of the millet system in the East they have imported great numbers of Sunni Muslims with inherited attitudes towards the kuffar. These attitudes form the psychoaffective foundation for mainstream anti-Zionism across the entire Muslin world.
The irony of the emerging situation is that European and North American diplomats played a significant role in enabling the exploitation of Palestinian refugees from the very beginning. Western advisers to Arab governments (many of which were still UK protectorates at the time, while the Sa'udis were a US protectorate) helped develop the position of the Arab League in 1948. It was US aid from 1948 that enabled UNWRA to develop as it has done.
Now Western capitals parody Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s. You'd be inhuman not to laugh.
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"Hezbollah, meanwhile, is reeling from the damage the attacks have delivered to its command and control systems..."
Not at all. Hezbollah does not depend on electronic devices for communication. They have a very sophisticated system of interconnecting tunnels which communicate via "runner". Typically this means a courier on a motorcycle. Speedy, secure, and untouchable. Hezbollah command and control is structured to handle situations like these. So no real damage to them was done. Although the Israelis did manage to dial up the hate-o-meter even further. Hezbollah devastated a Mossad building a few weeks ago, killing 22 and wounding over seventy. This stupid reprisal on their part will do nothing but guarantee an even more devastating attack on another Israeli base or intelligence asset. Israel is in shit up to its eyeballs.
Hezbo-celebrate all you want, when thousands of terrorists get their balls blown off it must effect that mob's morale. Not all the way to the point of near-humanity, btu still . . .
Try not get those tears on your bagel.
And there it is.
Yup, there it is, minus a reference to your nose but plain as that self same nose on your face.
ahhh here we go...i love it when the jew haters reveal themselves. the honesty is refreshing
The homeostasis of hate
ha lol
Your coinage. Do you remember?
This must have been months? Years? In the planning.
You don't get pissed off on Monday and by Friday have infiltrated an international supply chain, make sure your victims have a need for new electronics and booby trap a particular batch that's bound for particular people.
Many years. Well before 2022. It's curious that they pulled the trigger now. It's like firing a gun with one bullet. They can't do it again. Israel is desperate to make their allies believe they are in charge of the escalatory ladder. They are not. Northern and central Israel is getting pounded by rockets as I write.
The Jews are in shit up to their eyeballs. It is a fight to the death for them, or so it seems to me.
The Muslim world hates them, and the progressive western world hates them: white oppressors.
I think it’s almost certain that Israel will fail as a state, and that the Jews will be once again cast asunder.
It’s demographics.
One day the Americans will stop supporting them. The Jewish lobby in America has done a spectacular job and should be congratulated. But ultimately the world wants to kill them. You seem like you would be happy to kill them, or maybe you just want them to stop killing Muslims?
I’m agnostic. Generally I don’t like people slaughtering each other but it seems that’s our way. Again, history seems to support this conclusion.
The only thing a deadman knows is - it’s better to be alive; Histories judgment, it’s better to be on the winning side.
As a nice little cosy Canadian, it’s not much more than a TV show for me.
I own 1000 shares in general dynamics.
Contributing less than zero to the discussion, and begging to muted.
So be it.
I like. Honest.
It’ll be interesting to see if our author mutes me.
Your coinage
Turbo America could very well ditch Israel. State Dep't would do so immediately if they could. Zionism incompatible with the latest iteration of woke messianic aggression that inspires US foreign policy. As Turbo America sinks into bankruptcy and squalor it will follow the example of the UK during the golden days of OPEC in the 70s. It will sell itself to Qatar and Iran. Jihadi networks already well-established in the US itself and the US (like France and UK) sees Hezbollah as a partner, while Israel is 'problematic'. The Turbo American infatuation with Islam and the Global South will enable Washington to reconnect with its anticolonial heritage. US was once a key influence/supporter of secular Arab nationalism, now it will champion Islamogauchiste politics on a global scale.
But so what? Israel is stronger now than it was between 1948-67. And the Levantine Arabs have a miserable track record geopolitically, the Palestinians especially. Things will get very uncomfortable for North American Jews, but Israel will quite likely do just fine.
Terrorists killing terrorists. Why can't terrorists just get along?
Losing hundreds ~ thousands of operatives is devastating , these were leaders. It’s a crushing tally. BTW why have pagers and tunnels/runners?
You obviously know nothing about Hezbollah. They have a civil and a military component. 95% of the pagers/walkie-talkies were in the hands of the civil component. That means Mossad killed and maimed ambulance drivers, doctors, nurses, medical administration bureaucrats, and firemen (and their families). These were not soldiers. The military component communicate via fiber optic cable and couriers. Hezbollah is unleashing hell even deeper into Israel as a result. I'm sorry you only listen to regime media, because they are liars. One way or the other, the truth is going to hit you like a freight train in the months ahead. Israel cannot survive this because Hezbollah missiles and drones are stored and are launched from stores deep underground in the hills and mountains of southern Lebanon. Only nuclear weapons could affect these deeply buried assets. Israel is simply killing Lebanese civilians out of impotent rage. And do tell, where is the vaunted IDF invasion of Southern Lebanon? By the way, I have no dog in this fight. But people should at least make an effort to understand what is happening.
💩 lol 😂 yea Cosa Nostra had a civil component too. Then go join them, the Israeli geezers went and fought, your turn. I’ve been watching Hizb not in person but at the same distance as you for decades. They can give shelter to Gazans then, as that worked so well last time.
Go DIY, meanwhile we can stop stabbing people who trust us, in this case the Israelis.
Hizb initiated this round with Israel oct 8, on its own.
Israel is just shooting back.
They bring it on themselves, lose and come crying to the Internet left.
So 💩 . Go and join them or STFU.
Like I said, instead of making personal attacks on people who don't share your bizarre notions, just watch Israel go down slowly in the coming year. It will be like watching someone drown very slowly.
"This incredible series of hits on Hezbollah these past few days do usher in a new phase in the conflict and threaten to unleash what we all know is an inevitable war: that being Israel and Hezbollah.
The war will be between the United States and its catamites and Hezbollah and Iran on the other side.
If Iran and Hezbollah refuse to take the bait, Israel simply will act more and more outrageously until they have no other choice, whereupon Israel will run screaming to its American thug.
This is accurate.
But you see we’re a millstone not a friend
I don't understand why Nord Stream is still not in use years after the attack. It's repairable and they only broke 3 out of 4 pipes.
This article makes the argument that the whole thing could have been staged to give a reason to screw Europe. Keep in mind that Ukraine is being paid by Russia to transit gas through their country, while they're at war. Hmmm
https://off-guardian.org/2023/02/21/nordstream-2-seymour-hersh-feeds-the-fake-binary/
Total speculation here but I think Reich and his acolytes used his bat-shit crazy science as an excuse for pedophilia. And given the bat-shit crazy drag queen story hours, I'd say it's all the same thread.
I wouldn't doubt it.
It's beyond unfortunate that Reich, like all Marxists, correctly identified some problems and completely misapplied the solutions.
He was onto something with research into Orgone, and it appears that is now overshadowed by his misguided and destructive ideas about sexuality.
Greek island of Ikaria is another alleged 'blue zone'. Boomers of course love this kind of thing, and it has
become a bit of a pilgrimage/field-research site for an increasing number of 'traveller not tourist' types of that generation..
While I can imagine that the sea air and dry earth of Ikaria engenders long life, Greeks (bless em) are by no means averse to getting everything they can out of their kleptocratic government. Ikaria is also a communist stronghold, so there's that too. Then there's the national tourism board, which, maybe trying to make lemonade out of lemons, promotes Ikaria as island of the long-lived.
So in summary...yeah idk about these 'blue zones'
As I understood about Okinawa: it was a blue zone a long time ago. It was a poor island, so people didn't eat much - what is good for living long.
But now it is full of American soldiers and their fast food. No wonder that many Okinawans are fat now.
If the European Union wants to become more productive, they may have to encourage the people to work more.
Sometimes it is better to enjoy a music video and not know the backstory.
RIP Donald Sutherland, hope Kate Bush is doing well.
TIL from Niccolo that Donald Sutherland passed . . .
“the liberation of the individual from the constraints of biology" - great synopsis. The "secret hidden force" aspect seemed to be progressivism's subconscious yearning for and [failed] attempt at an absolute (comparable to Teilhard's de Chardin's Omega Point?). Query if Bloom also influenced based upon his irl behavior which Bellow described in Ravelstein although the monism would be inconsistent with Maimonides (purported origin of esoteric elements of the Straussians).
Masturbatory energy powering intergalactic travel: WTF!
The Europeans failed to solve the conflicts in exYugoslavia because Americans were sabotaging all peace efforts.
Serbian?
I'm trying to visualize how Trump should try to counter the Iranians ayatollahs having as their motto "Death to America, Death to Israel" etc. Obama et al gave them a lot in sweetheart backroom deals with very few apparent strings attached, infuriating lots of Israelis and American Jews.
Trump's approach would be to say something like [picture Phil Hartman as a rambunctious Frank Sinatra], "What's with this 'Death to America' crap, Iran? What's with 'Death to Israel?' We want to love you and make great deals with you! Persian women are beautiful!"
Wilhelm Reich sounds like a Hollywood villain's name. There was that New Yorker article a few years back about how the West German government, literally in the name of fighting fascism, abducted children from families and sent them to live with serial child molesters.
Red, hilarious! Trump is somehow effective while having the affect of an imbecile.
Reich was a wackjob but I’d estimate his influence on the sexual revolution and the current decline in TFR at almost zero. Variety of technological and social factors much more decisive.
A cultural change this significant can’t happen without significant latent demand from society. Short of direct coercion by force, people can’t really be memed into doing stuff they don’t want to do. As it turns out, people just really like having consequence-free sex! Once the technology and economic structures enabled it, they didn’t need a Reich to show them how.
Not every churchgoer is a priest, and not every priest is a theologian, but the theology undergirds it all. No there is not a grand top-down conspiracy, but this aspect of communist revolutionary thinking pops up again and again. It's no accident that the dominant woke position now is "there's no such thing as parental rights", and they think the school should be able to trans your kid behind your back, it all fits into their revolutionary theology. It's not an accident that woke commies like to promote "family abolition"
"What do you guys think?"
I think "anti-family" is another term for "anti-humanity." These nihilists, including Black Lives Matter (which originally called for, on their website, the dissolution of the African-American family, as if the US government hadn't already gone far enough in destroying urban black families), have a lot to answer for.
I used to think that Western liberals hated Israel and opposed every step it ever takes to defend itself and its people—"How dare you blow the balls off hundreds of terrorists, they might have been standing close to a child! that's against the law!"—bc they are bigoted against Jews, but lately I've been thinking the opposite is true: Western liberals denounce Israel for harming a hair on a child's head while sweeping every Arab massacre and every deranged declaration of bloothirst by some frothing ayatollah under the rug bc they are actually deeply bigoted against Arabs.
Western liberals excused 10/7 as some kind of legitimate form of "resistance" bc they think there could never be an Arab Mandela or even a Gerry Adams, that the best they can muster is blind massacres and thus are completely incapable of attaining any civilized standard; they excuse every barrage of rockets and every declaration of Jew hate bc they have placed Arabs under the heading of Oppressed in their cosmology, meaning they are below responsibility and agency, that they can never do but only be done to; they absolutely ignore or excuse the fact that Hamas hides in schools, mosques and hospitals and that it teaches its children a level of Jew hate that would make Eichmann blush, because they consider this normal, understandable behavior, which they would abhor and denounce if any other people on the planet had become this ugly and degraded.
Western liberals think of the Palestinians as the angry retarded baby that lives next door and refuses to shut up, and Israel as the parent of this crazy kid who is always trying to burn the building down—please, Israel, can't you finally shut this kid up? I don't care if it slits your throat in the night, we just want some peace!
Western liberals have been the worst enablers of the Palestinian cause, meaning everything they say and do only makes life worse for the actual Palestinian people—if you refuse to hold people to a civilized standard, they will never become civilized. It's time to stop the bigotry and demand that the Palestinians dedicate themselves to peaceful coexistence, the same standard the West demands of every other tribe on earth.
Every other tribe on earth is allowed to arm themselves with whatever weapons they need to defend themselves against attack. This is a right that is Israelis have and the Palestinians do not.
I find this hypocrisy particularly egregious when coming from Americans who proclaim that even private citizens have the right to bear arms.
Arms, missiles, suicide vests, massacres—what has it gotten the Palestinian people? Gaza is rubble and in the WB they're ringed by the IDF, who can't turn their backs for a second.
Fine, let's imagine the Palestinians have tanks, planes, rocket launchers etc, what does that get them? More war, death, bloodshed, misery, much of it cheered on by the West, who treat all foreign conflicts as just a pretext to either preen about their morality or use it as fodder in a local political foodfight.
Since the 1948 Partition Plan, the Arabs have NEVER ONCE accepted the existence of the Jewish state, but instead launched multiple wars (all of which they lost), and when this failed, next came suicide bombers on buses and in restaurants. Israel offered them their own state in 2000 and 2008 (among other times), and were rejected each time, without even a counter-offer.
The only path forward for these people is to finally abandon their bloody fantasies of revenge and of erasing the "Zionist entity" and to commit themselves to peaceful coexistence. This would be a novelty for the Palestinians, but who knows they might even like it and it might even work—certainly plotting endless massacres and stewing in genocidal fantasies has only led to disaster.
That doesn't answer the more general question of who is entitled to weapons. My answer to that is everyone.
Weapons and the use of them is like their inverse, medicine, both are necessary for maintaining human life and must be obtained and obtained at the correct strength and applied at the right time and place.
I regard it as an axiom of both politics and nature that force can only be stopped by an opposing force of equal strength. This current war, which is of course only the latest phase of a war that has been going on for decades, will only end either when one side has totally destroyed the other (which would be a massacre of millions) or by both sides reaching parity.
The Palestinians are armed to the teeth -- What in the world are you talking about? Gaza itself is nothing but a gigantic Iranian military base. If the Gazan government had put the extraordinary amount of money they are stealing into developing Gaza, the place would be Singapore by now.
Hamas was directly funded by the Israeli government for years, senior military and intelligence officers have confirmed it. If it was a crime for Tehran to do it, then it was a crime for Tel Aviv to do it too.
Israel will condemn the acts it has explicitly done itself.
Read your literature. Israel always planned to cleanse the West Bank and Gaza. Even before the 1948 that was already being discussed among Zionists.
The strategy to block negotiations has always been the same: Israel asks just a bit more than the Palestinians are prepared to cede and then they accuse the Palestinians of blocking the negotiations. But whenever the Palestinians give in they can be sure that there will be additional demands. Netanyahu still is playing this game.
oh ive read the literature. always w the 1948, 1967, always excavating some grievance or finding some nefarious Jewish conspiracy. but what about 2024? what about today and tomorrow? when will the Palestinians grow up and commit to building their own nation instead of destroying another one?
and as far as the Palestinians' thoughts about peace and their approach to negotiations, don't listen to me, take it from the man himself.
ARAFAT to Oriana Fallaci:
We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles that we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers; second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic and military forms, and to drive it out of Palestine forever; third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state; fourth: this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders: to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.
FALLACI: Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.
ARAFAT: No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations.
He said it, not me.
Are you really surprised that the Palestinians initially wanted their land back that was stolen from them? Find me a person who is immediately prepared to compromise after he has been robbed.
You implicit suggestion is that if the Palestinians had been more flexible in 1948, 1965 or whenever they would have been in a better position. That is a big lie. They likely would have been in a worse position. Israel would have pocketed the concessions and then it would have continued with more robbery. That is what we saw happening after the Oslo Agreements.
"if the Palestinians had been more flexible in 1948, 1965 or whenever they would have been in a better position."
How could they be in a worse position?? Gaza is rubble and the WB has them ringed by the IDF, who cannot allow them freedom of movement, as the last time they did, "martyrs" blew themselves up on buses and in restaurants—anything to kill Jews.
The Palestinians have NEVER ONCE accepted the existence of the Jewish state, never once accepted a peace offer, never once even made a counter-offer, never once renounced violence and the goal of destroying Israel.
Perhaps in all recorded history no people have been worse-served by their supposed leadership than the Palestinians. When is it time to stop thinking about 1918 and 1948 and start thinking about 2025 or 2035? People who catalogue and fetishize the endless list of Palestinian grievances do them no favors.
Time to finish it comes.
Once again you are not telling the truth.
The Palestinians accepted the existence of Israel in Oslo. And look what they got in return.
Hamas has adapted its program to prepare for a future agreement. But they won't recognize Israel unless they get an explicit commitment of Israel to a future Palestinian state.
I think that Western liberals all have unresolved authority issues. Most of them have been overprotected and pampered, so their rage against authority is not explicable as a result of childhood abuse (with a significant minority of exceptions, of course). Young activists are a huge part of the anti-Israel demographic. I think it is likely that they identify with the terrorists as enhanced versions of angry teenagers striking a blow against the adult establishment. Western kids are immersed in gaming and other online fantasy material to such a degree that it is more real to them than what is actually happening. Maybe they experienced Oct 7 as an enactment of an extremely attractive fantasy, in which their side triumphed in the most sadistic, gory game scenario imaginable. During the week after the terrorist attack on innocent Israeli civilians, local college students were complaining about the MSM airing news about the details of the attack. They construed this coverage as motivated by an intention on the part of the media to make their audiences "upset" and thereby increase their opposition to the "liberation struggle" of the Palestinians.
"Young activists are a huge part of the anti-Israel demographic. I think it is likely that they identify with the terrorists as enhanced versions of angry teenagers striking a blow against the adult establishment." 🎯
It's a short step from denouncing your parents for making you clean your room and be in bed by 11 to denouncing the adult world for failing to achieve peace, love and and the eradication of suffering; it's a short step from reading comic books and imbibing comic-book morality to believing that every conflict has a Hero and a Villain and your job is to assign their labels and act accordingly.
It's not a surprise or coincidence that there were things like the Hitler Youth, the Red Guard, or that Pol Pot's child soldiers were the most vicious. Young people have enormous passion and energy, which various unscrupulous opportunists are always happy to manipulate.
Vicious aggression and cruelty are obviously innate in our species, and when I was a child there was an oft repeated saying that “children are cruel.” It was assumed then that kids need to be trained to not be cruel, if they were to become civilized members of the community. When adults intentionally develop childrens’ innate cruelty, or even reframe cruelty as “kindness,” we end up where we are today.
All true, but beside the point IMHO. The Palestinians have been agents of chaos for a century. Every external power that wanted unrest backed the Palestinians one way or another. In the '30s and '40s it was Berlin, later the UK (in 1948 the UK opened its arms dumps to Arab forces and British officers led the only successful Arab forces, ethnically cleansing Jews from the West Bank), then the Soviets. Now Turbo America wants a Palestinian state, presumably to maintain a strategy of tension that will allow Washington to play games across the region. The messianic utopian imperatives of Wilsonian foreign policy (with all its attendant cynicism and delusion) are now channelled into oblique support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and even Hizbollah.
It won't work. Key Arab states have had enough. The Gulf rulers, Qatar being the exception, understand what it is all about. Israel is slowly but surely being integrated into the region. October 7 was a wake up call for the region, much like the Arab Spring. As I have said before, there would be plenty of people across the Arab world praying for Netanyahu, if only out of self-interest.
As for Western liberals, who cares? The West as a whole lacks agency, which cannot be purchased by financing NGO crisis actors. The Gazan war reveals the irrelevancy of the activist class and the people who use conflict tourism to generate synthetic identities. The substantial, underlying, forces cannot be controlled by rhetoric or wishful thinking distilled from ideologies prepared by fantasists and liars.
Western progressives are colourful and a great nuisance, but it is a mistake to focus on them. The ground is shifting under their feet on any number of levels.
Washington and London now host significant diasporas filled with jihadi supporters. This will inevitably lead to tragedy, but the US and UK will learn the lessons of Lebanon and Kuwait the hard way. Wider geopolitical factors are also coming into play: the erosion of popular support for the regime in Tehran, the rise of India, Eurasian economic integration, successful and sustainable development by secular regimes in Central Asia and moderation in the Gulf.
Ant-Zionism is a sink for negative psychoaffective energy but people who are destabilised by the issue are not going to get a say when and where it counts.
such a great comment, it needs to be a book!
Westerners generally find the Middle East a challenge. Differences in language, culture and religion add up, as do the complexities of the cross-cultural interactions. This is amplified by the fact that the Levant is the most Western adjacent part of the region in terms of politics and culture and the most exposed to Western ideologies which have been adapted for local use, often very unhappily. Secular nationalism, revolutionary socialism, fascism all found supporters in the universities of Beirut and Damascus. The Westernised Levantines still build careers on playing games with all of this. Very lucrative in medua, academia or NGO land, wherever fantasy reigns supreme.
The Palestinians have the great misfortune of having a predatory and de,lusional leadership class. In the 19th century the Arab ruling class sold off land to foreigners, above all the Russian Orthodox Church (the biggest private landlord in Israel today) and the Zionist movement. The Palestinian leadership were out of their depth: corrupt, steeped in contempt for Jews, confident that they could negotiate with or even control external powers. They prioritised relationships with the British over the Jewish community. Huge mistake, repeated endlessly with the US, EU and UN today. They bank on a third party giving them a state. Also bank on Resistance Incorporated lasting forever.
Western liberals simply clueless, even more delusional than the Palestinians.
what a horrid symbiosis of enabling and infantilization, it's really akin to a junkie and their dealer.
the worst thing that can happen to any people is to become an international "cause"--not only does your actual life and its quality become irrelevant, but your leaders become graft junkies and your tears and misery become valuable commodities to be sold to various opportunists, grifters and camera whores. The Palestinians are just the latest stick crafted to beat the Jews with and if they over kick their crippling addiction to hate, envy and bloodthirst maybe they can achieve some type of normalcy.
The Palestinians can opt for alternatives any time they like. There are other Arabs that have done that and plenty more moving towards the same.
My guess is that the Palestinian diaspora in the West will collect the rent from radical chic in perpetuity, the Palestinians of Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza will head like lemmings off whatever cliffs are in view while many, possibly most, of the Arab Israelis quietly give thanks for the mixed blessings that have come from living under a Zionist regime.
The West, however, is in for extremely serious trouble. Having dismissed, misinterpreted or ignored the legacy of the millet system in the East they have imported great numbers of Sunni Muslims with inherited attitudes towards the kuffar. These attitudes form the psychoaffective foundation for mainstream anti-Zionism across the entire Muslin world.
The irony of the emerging situation is that European and North American diplomats played a significant role in enabling the exploitation of Palestinian refugees from the very beginning. Western advisers to Arab governments (many of which were still UK protectorates at the time, while the Sa'udis were a US protectorate) helped develop the position of the Arab League in 1948. It was US aid from 1948 that enabled UNWRA to develop as it has done.
Now Western capitals parody Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s. You'd be inhuman not to laugh.