The stock market is an abattoir. I think it’s because the truth of the war is setting in.
I don’t even want to think about my financial situation. I’m not panicking but I’m back to being cash poor. I have no debts, thank God. I don’t need to fill up a gas tank every three days. That said, I do wonder whether the whole thing may go up in smoke. That would be concerning. (LOL)
There is open chat among the Democrats about replacing Biden as the nominee in 2024. With friends like his own party members, who needs enemies?
Taboos must be observed in this day: I have a weird feeling that the issue will be settled by Mother Nature within six months.
No one is in control.
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I just learned the term “belligerent privilege”— a strange way of saying that non-combatants are not legit targets in a war. But what happens when one of the sides (usually the weaker) leverages the presence of non-combatants? You got trouble in River City.
Another similarity between Ukraine/Palestine is the alleged use of civilians as cover, and blaming the inevitable civilian deaths on the other side.
It’s always difficult to get at the truth. Each side accuses the other.
The weaker side in an asymmetrical fight has an incentive to use civilians as cover to make the other guy look bad. They don’t care how many of their own they sacrifice. The side that has no ability to maneuver will ensconce itself in a place that’s difficult for the other side to dislodge them AND the optics are terrible.
Hamas is said to do it. They deny it. They say the Israelis do it.
Same deal here.
Early in the war, I began a Twitter account, since deactivated for mental health reasons. I got into an argument with Joe Lauria of Consortium News. He denied that the Russians were deliberately targeting civilians. I agreed with him and acknowledged my agreement but I drew parallels between Israel and Russia in this regard.
He’s 100% anti-Israel and took great offense. His argument was that the Israelis, having a cheer squad in the US which complain vociferously to the media about unfavorable coverage, kill civilians with impunity. In other words: they do it because they can get away with it.
The Russians, having no such cheer squad, only kill civilians because the Ukrainians force them to.
I couldn’t argue with that logic but I didn’t have the guts to say what I was thinking, which is this: anyone who thinks that a professional army deliberately targets civilians because their Stateside allies enable them is twisted. Have the Israelis grown callous to Palestinian suffering? Yes, and screw Abraham Foxman for screeching about this article.
This is war, goddammit. Let’s never forget that.
I support Israel because, if I were a Jew in Europe in 1946, I’d have gone to Palestine.
I have to look at the pictures of those dead children precisely because it rips up my guts.
But no, the IDF does not deliberately target civilians.
Early in the war, I saw in pro-Russian twitter accounts a virtual rip-off of an Israeli cartoon. I can’t find them anymore but here’s the cartoon. There are many versions of the Israeli one.
The cartoon has been copied and applied to other conflicts. Syria:
I’m getting my information about this war mostly from people whose politics I usually detest. Politics really does make very strange bedfellows indeed. One gets information where one can.