621–630 of 832 posts
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A year on, some Lebanese bystanders hurt in Israel’s pager attack still recovering... Over 3,400 were wounded when devices belonging to Hezbollah members exploded https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan...
3,400 bystanders? Or 3,400 mostly-Hezbollah but some bystanders?
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Does it? Do you have any data on how many of these devices ended up in civilian hands? Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only. Do you have more information? How many civilians there even use these pagers instead of mobile phones? Are there any ?
A year on, some Lebanese bystanders hurt in Israel’s pager attack still recovering... Over 3,400 were wounded when devices belonging to Hezbollah members exploded https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan...
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Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity. And things don't have to be universal to be true, but just one leader/nation bombing or abusing the shit out of you is all you need to teach you this lesson, and waving the Geneva convention in their face won't help you. The real world is harsh, unfair…
>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity. No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
> No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
The OP is correct, historically. US might, albeit aimed at anyone attempting to disrupt trade, WAS the basis for US hegemony. The US effectively policed the largest oceans, ensuring world trade was reliable and cost-stabilized since WW2. As long as you dealt in USD, you were supported. A type of soft influence that was very effective.
This has been disrupted recently. The US has declined to re-invest in the navy (ship construction has almost bottomed out), routed most of the navy to east asia, and antagonized other nations by disrupting agreements that could have sustained on momentum. This year's farming subsidy (to the tune of 12 billion) is due to those abandoned agreements, paired with unnecessary antagonism.
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For one it wasn't targeted, but either way, if it, as you claim, was targeted then it would be even worse because it's worse to kill and maim kids by targeting them than by being indifferent.
How was this not targeted? I was the most targeted military operation we know of. Give me any example of anything in warfare that is close to that.
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> Passes the smell test to me Gotcha. Thanks. > Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike? Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious. > Would you still have a bone to pick with my credentials if I said that I thought the Dresden firebombings Felt the need to know whether I was mistaking an arm-chair opinion for an expert opinion, is all.
> Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious. He did prefix it with "I think", highlighting that "this is my opinion / my interpretation", not that he is issuing a ruling as a judge in an international court.
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That's just wishful thinking. I would argue that by going after Israel in such a blatantly biased way the ICC and the UN have fallen to precisely the sort of groups you want to use them against. Not saying the ICC can't be useful, you would just have to massively limit the scope of their "authority" to realistic targets. I.e. South American dictators and various warlords. And of course islamic terrorists. Plenty of i…
How is holding Israel accountable for it's very well documented war crimes "blatantly biased"?
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>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity. No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
>>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity. > No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD. The OP is correct, historically. US…
And how did the American economy get to that size without the military protecting it from IDK, the USSR just taking it?
>As long as you dealt in USD, you were supported.
And what happened to you if you wanted to trade with the USSR? You're omitting that part
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> US military ... worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds... Acutely aware of this fact, yeah. > There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them. Not wrong. None of the former great empires that fell were as military capable as the super powers of the modern era. > And in the immortal words of William Munny…
Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere , because the nation-state is genocide!
This is the 2nd time "[bomb] Dresden" at me in this thread. Interesting.
> by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified ...
Well, if you're curious about where his "logic" (his political hypothesis) leads, Mamdani wrote an entire book on it (which is in fact the subject of the interview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Settler_nor_Native
(from the book's Introduction):
... Nuremberg effectively depoliticized Nazism, saddling responsibility for Nazi violence with particular men and ignoring the fact that these men were engaged in the project of political modernity on behalf of a constituency: the nation, the volk. The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism's political roots ... After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.
... If Nazism had been understood not as a crime but as a political project of the nation-state, there may yet have been a place for Jews in Europe, in denationalized states committed to the equal protection of every citizen. However, because the response to Nazism took the nation-state for granted, the solution for the Jews turned out to be the nation-state, again.
... South Africans didn't give up their cultural identities and reject diversity. They rejected the politicization of diversity. Decolonizing the political through the recognition of a shared survivor identity does not require that we all pretend we are the same; far from it. It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you call it terrorism when Israel sent mailbombs to US top brass, including our president?
This has not happened anywhere other than your imagination. You mean "if" not "when."
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archives/letterbombs-mail...