It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.

They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can’t be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.

They’re liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that’s what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.

I’m too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.

And this is about the level of baseline antagonism i expected from you.

I find it amusing that your perspective is apparently that the region just isnt important, and our continued involvement and presence there (at great cost) is just some unexplainable enigma that boils down to personal grievances between leaders

It exists solely to suppress democratic electoral turnout i guess lmao

And who doesn’t pass by Israel’s Mediterranean territorial waters when shipping to many other countries, such as [checks notes] Turkiye, Syria, or Israel?

Right, because countries can only really exert control and influence over their immediate surroundings. Especially when those countries have a willingness and motivation to use their significant intelligence/military funding, which is useful only to the immediate territorial boundaries of that area and not any further. I see no usefulness for, hypothetically, restricting Iranian diplomatic and militarization activities by having a nuclear superpower and counterintelligence capabilities with western ties and assets in the region.

Certainly not. Especially a nation whose aggression could be spun sympathetically as defensive against islamic/arabic [scary] antisemitism, if it were ever to occur, as opposed to a nation who may not have a compelling narrative of oppression, or isn’t ideologically set in judeo-christian providence.

Get real. If Egypt clamped down on the suez canal they’d be thrown out of the UN and sanctioned so fast their economy would collapse before the first flood gate closed.

Not many others with the same ideological alignment and geological position to exert control over access to trade routes through and around the Mediterranean, we don’t.

To say nothing of the significance of Israel as an intelligence apparatus - Israel is probably the most important ally in that region by a mile.

I’ve never suggested Israel is ‘utterly reliant on the us’, only that the US is their biggest ally protecting them from international sanction.

Netanyahu almost certainly is reacting to the political environment in the US, but I think it’s more of an opportunity he seeks to exploit than a motivation for further expansion.

I also think Liberals tend to de-emphasize the importance of Israel to US foreign policy goals, which includes Democrats. I don’t think most democrats would take action against Israel because most of them know that losing them in the ME puts most of their foreign operations there at risk. It’s wishful thinking that the Democrats might be taking action if they weren’t currently in an election against a fascist.

Call me paranoid

Paranoid isn’t the word I was going to use, I was thinking ‘self-obsessed’.

Seriously though, I think it’s a little conceited to conceive of the escalating middle-eastern conflict as revolving around some personal vendetta against our specific domestic political party.

Netanyahu is an opportunist. A bunch of things came together to set the stage for this expansion, but he’s been a imperialist with eyes for Lebanon and “Greater Israel” since at least when he served in the IDF, and he is not alone inside Israel, either. If he were ousted tomorrow, there’s a greater than 50% chance a new zion-expansionist gets voted in after him. He’s personally unpopular domestically - not because of his activities in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon, but because he’s cashing out Israel’s diplomatic capital all at once and Israel is likely to see a period of isolation and an economic collapse once the dust settles. Israel was enjoying prosperity and a lack of consequences to their expansion through occupation and settlement before they turned Gaza to rubble, and Netanyahu has put that all at risk again by going in balls-deep and daring the US to pull him out.

Democrats would prefer Israel not make a bloodbath out of their carefully curated diplomatic embargo around the middle east, but they certainly still want Israel there acting as their proxy. Democrats won’t risk being the ones to lose that foreign policy keystone by making any kind of opposition public, but if they can manage to get Netanyahu ousted their PR nightmare might finally come to an end.

I’m not sure what you’re even on about, if the pagers (in your view) don’t qualify as ‘booby traps’, they’d still fit the description of ‘other devices’ that are in the same restriction:

3. “Other devices” means manually-emplaced munitions and devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.

I personally think their being disguised as civilian objects is of particular note and makes the offence more severe, but even without that classification it’s considered a war crime

1. This Article applies to: (a) mines (b) booby-traps; and ( c) other devices.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to direct weapons to which this Article applies, either in offence, defence or by way of reprisals, against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians.

3. The indiscriminate use of weapons to which this Article applies is prohibited. Indiscriminate use is any placement of such weapons:

(a) which is not on, or directed against, a military objective; or

It would be a tall order to prove that the pagers were actually and exclusively distributed to Hezbollah combatants

(b) which employs a method or means of delivery which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

As with above, they had no reasonable way of knowing that the pagers would be directed as intended or be on their intended target at the time of discharge

( c) which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Pretty clearly caused incidental loss of civilian life and injury, especially in relation to the concrete military advantage. I haven’t even heard stated any material military advantage gained from this other than relating to the fear they intended to evoke

4. All feasible precautions shall be taken to protect civilians from the effects of weapons to which this Article applies. Feasible precautions are those precautions which are practicable or practically possible taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations.

No matter how you’re slicing it, under Protocol II of the UN the pager attacks would be a violation and subject to war crime charges. It being a literal ‘booby trap’, ‘mine’, or ‘other device’ is immaterial to its criminality.

No, the distinction being made between article 4 and 5 is intended to separate intentionally and mindfully placed mines on military objectives where the risk of civilian injury is low and explosives that are ‘remotely sent’ where the locations must be accurately recorded to prevent accidental discharge after the conflict has ceased.

I see no way to argue that they can ensure the pagers or radios were placed on such ‘military targets’, nor can they account or record the locations of any that failed to discharge. For all the Lebanese know, there are pagers or radios still in circulation that did not explode on the day of the attack, or that there are more explosives in other mobile devices that have yet to be activated, or were abandoned for use for whatever reason and may go off unexpectedly in the future. It is exactly that uncertainty and the use of everyday objects that makes this terror attack a war crime - not that it matters to a body that has been completely neutered and is incapable of holding Israel accountable without the consent of the US.

Hiding behind the verbiage of the UN charter is cowardly.

I think you’re splitting hairs.

The intent of the inclusion of boobytraps within that definition is pretty clear. Ordinary objects, when used as the vector for unexpected explosive discharge, become something distrustful and fearsome. How does one know if a device they are purchasing or picking up is one that’s been modified to explode during normal usage?

Hezbollah isn’t just a paramilitary group, though, it’s an actual political party in Lebanon.

You’d have to have an extremely narrow understanding of who Hezbollah even is to claim the attack was legitimate

Not to mention the intentional fear the strike created that now legitimizes Hezbollah’s mandate against Israel. Yea, it was ‘shite’, but it seems pretty well designed to manufacture fear and chaos and to bait Lebanon into a broader conflict.

I kinda hope it has changed since then, but probably not as much as I’d like.

I have a Samsung smart TV that is not connected to any networks, and every few days it will display a ‘detecting device’ loading screen when switching to my input that fails after 30 seconds or until I cancel it (canceling does not seem to impact its functioning)

I have no evidence but I strongly suspect this to be related to attempting to record and send device data to a remote server.

I realize this is very sensitive issue and things have likely changed since april, but the last time I saw this polled Jewish Americans support Israel’s response to Oct.7 about 62%, 33% oppose

Granted, since april and just off the top of my head, Israel has bombed a number of Gaza refugee camps, killed the Hamas negotiator, conducted two terror attacks against Lebanon, and now is talking about sending ground troops in across the border,… so… yea maybe things have changed

But im glad to have Sanders pushing for this though, I think it carries more weight coming from him.

See everything is fine

Republicans (and liberal democrats) hated communist russia.

I think there’s an argument to be made that Trump and Netanyahu are uniquely situated over other fascists, but I think their dominance is more a function of taking up all the oxygen rather than them being uniquely evil/competent/popular (at least when it comes to trump)

I agree that Netanyahu has proven to be extremely effective as a politician, and is leaps-and-bounds more educated/intelligent than Trump (pretty sure he has 3 or 4 degrees, from MIT and Harvard and was rumored to be a prolific student).

I think if/when he ever gets voted out/thrown in jail/assassinated, he will leave Israel as a moldy peach to whoever takes his place. They’ve effectively burned their good-will, even between 5-Eyes states, and managed to elevate/coalesce the surrounding regional powers and their reputations (Iran and Lebanon are currently getting a ton of credit for not taking the bait and escalating with Israel, and that’s done quite a lot to rehabilitate their reputations in the ME and with Global superpowers like China and Russia). Even if there was a successor as prolific as Netanyahu, they would be left without the standing or connections that he had, and western appetite for more escalation from them will have effectively run out.

All that said; the problem of Israeli imperialism won’t go away with him, even if it will be a lot less effective in his absence. We need to start thinking of Israel as the Ethnostate that it is, and reevaluate their role in our foreign policy. I think if there’s anything their war in Gaza has proven is that they are far more ideologically fascistic than anyone in the west really was willing to recognize. That they didn’t end their war and return to their apartheid domination, and instead chose to continue escalating into genocide and now expanding their border with Lebanon, shows that their imperialism is of a different type and scale than the US’s has ever really been. They are far less content with soft power diplomacy than we are.

I really wish this generation was less enamored by the ‘great-men’ historical interpretation - it blinds us to the broader influences and motivations involved with international conflicts.

You picking fights under every top-level comment in this thread, huh?

Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the risk of regional escalation is very well understood even in the US state department.

I guess we’ll never know, huh?

If tomorrow Netanyahu get removed from office, there are probably 10 or 12 other genocidal war-mongers who could take his place.

I agree that the Israeli public is far more split on this issue, but the ultra nationalists have a pretty strong hold on power.