Thursday, April 18, 2013
White Pitcher: “Obama Gonna Take Our Guns Away, Man”
(www.politico.com)
“Today’s day and age has gotten so crazy. Shoot man, Obama wants to take our guns from us and everything. You got all this stuff going on; it’s just a little bit insane for me, man. I’m not sure how to take it.”
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< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 > Last ›Israel does not face any sort of existential threat. Egypt is in revolution. The Egyptian military has never been a match for Israel and currently is barely able to maintain it power against its own people. Ditto for Syria. Jordan presents no serious military threat. Iraq is a sectarian mess that currently couldn't invade an empty desert. Moreover Israel has nuclear weapons. Taiwan represents more of an existential threat to China than the Muslim world does to Israel. The Palestinian question is also the single greatest source of Muslim hatred of Israel. Discussions of Israeli security are a dodge, and in fact Israeli attempts to increase its own security have only resulted in decreasing it.
Do you honestly believe there are no other disagreements in the conflict?
I honestly expect that the Palestinians won't have Jerusalem as their shared capital. Whether it's because they cede it or because they refuse to cede it and get steamrolled is really their choice. I'm not sure which they're likely to choose. You can take the position that the Palestinians should get the whol region and the Jews should be deported to Baffin Island, but you can't realistically expect Israel will seriously entertain your suggestion.
Mother F'er.
The only way to avoid losing a war is try to find a lasting peace.
1) Territorial integrity of Palestine encompassing the entire West Bank (i.e. all or almost all settler enclaves evacuated)
2) East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital
3) Right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel and compensated for lost property
Each side will have to give in on at least one of those issues to end the conflict. Given the power imbalance, it will probably be 2-1 in favor of Israel. But Israel seems uninclined to give in on any of those three points.
The only way to avoid losing a war is try to find a lasting peace.
But, you can't find lasting peace with a counterparty that wants you destroyed.
There's very little risk of the Israeli's losing a conventional war. Their issue is they can't win a counter-insurgency.
They need an Arab gov't to control the Palestinian territories that actually fears their conventional military. Jordan could control the insurgency, and Arab state/police force can control Palestine, and would have the incentive to do so, b/c they would fear Israeli armored columns occupying Amman, and deposing the Hashemites.
The solution to East Jerusalem needs to be some sort of "Free-city" controlled by neither the Israelis or the Palestinians.
If the West Bank was ruled by a reasonable Gov't, you could see joint-policing (Israeli/Arab/3rd party, e.g. UN) like the Allies did in Berlin and Vienna after WW2.
I don't buy that most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. I think the vast majority of them want nothing more than a normal life, and would be perfectly happy to co-exist if they had the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and a functioning government and economy.
I'm not sure if you're looking at too short a time frame or not, but Israel has shown willingness to give back land for peace (the Suez, and one can look at unilateral Gaza disengagement that way). I suspect the latter half of three, but not the former half of three, is also doable. But I don't think they'd do it unless they believed they'd get a lasting peace, and I have no idea how you could reasonably convince them (or any reasonable person in their position) that's going to happen.
I agree with that. But a lot of the putative leadership, the Islamists and radicals, wants Israel destroyed (or at least finds that position politically useful). And they have powerful support from Islamists across the Sunni world, and also Iran.
The Palestinian issue, left unresolved, is a powerful club for lots of the nasty elements of Arab and Muslim society/leadership. The interests of the Arab man on the street doesn't seem to matter very much to their political leadership.
It's not clear that it's useful so long as it ignores the "Israel must be destroyed" demand. While many (probably the majority?) of Palestinians don't want that, and support for it would probably dry up almost completely if Palestine was a well functioning state such that everyone had houses, jobs, etc, it's not clear that it can be ignored before that. A chicken and egg-y kind of problem.
The 113th Congress just kicked off... Boehner expected to be reelected in about half an hour (though, there are some rumors to the contrary continuing to swirl, but nothing from any good sources).
Nice to see that the majority caucus can maintain its sense of humor -- but I think the joke is misplaced, as Boehner, I'm sure, would dearly, dearly love to have a good chunk of his own conference attend this imaginary obedience school!
Yeah, this is going to end well ...
Not that I have any stake in the fight, but isn't that same territory even more sacred to the Jewish people as it is to the Muslims? The Al-Aqsa Mosque rests on the Temple Mount. My understanding is that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third-holiest site in Islamic tradition; it is the holiest site in Judaic tradition. Why is the Arab claim to that territory any more valid that that of the Jewish people?
This is why I think resolution is nearly impossible in this conflict. Each side will not move because of a relatively small piece of land that holds incredibly strong religious significance. If it were at all politically feasible, I would suggest that East Jerusalem become truly international territory, belonging to neither group and maintained by secular authorities. That seems like the only true compromise; a global recognition that this territory is sacred to both sides and therefore cannot be fairly "owned" by one to the exclusion of the other.
The thing is, they probably won't. If it comes to actual war, I only see two legitimate possibilities: the Israelis win again, or the Israelis self-destruct by going nuclear when losing seems inevitable.
It's the same idea as to why there will almost certainly never be a direct war between the US and China. Both countries know that neither will ever stand for the ideological damage that comes from losing to the other. That means that the only end of such a conflict is one side nuking the other, which pretty much ends existence as we know it.
We need to hope as world citizens that we never end up with a nuclear power that is willing to accept that consequence.
Don't you have to be a member of Congress to be Speaker...
That's what makes them noteworthy.
I think a limited naval/air war is possible without ending in nukes. Neither country can ever realistically hope to project military power against the other's homeland, so the existential threat required to induce the use of nukes probably isn't there. If a limited war was lost, the losing gov't would simply fall (either through coup, resignation or election) and the lose blamed on those people.
Actually - you don't... it's never happened in practice, but there's no requirement that the House speaker be a sitting member -- it was one of the teaper dream scenarios.
Moot, though - Boehner reelected speaker on the 1st roll call... It was actually close - by my count, he escaped a second ballot by 2 votes.
Actually, I think the gig was probably up when the rumored plans to force a secret ballot for speaker never materialized.
Technically not, but since we were part of the UN forces and China was allied with North Korea, it's kind of a lawyer's point to say that we weren't fighting them.
I did not know that. Still, Allen West getting votes is inexcusable.
If it's a war that the Israelis have any chance of losing, there will be people outside of Israel to nuke, and I certainly see that as a possibility.
Am I misremembering, or wasn't there an actual direct shooting war between the US and Communist China in the 1950s?
Did China have nuclear weapons in the 1950s? I'm not snarking, but asking seriously.
one just can't currently imagine the US and China having anything to fight over. Everybody's just making too much money.
I can't imagine it either, under current financial conditions. But in the nuclear age, I can't imagine it even if the financial conditions change dramatically.
China did not build nuclear weapons till the 1960s. US use of them in the Korean War was seriously debated, and who knows how the Soviets would have reacted to that. Calmer minds prevailed.
No, not until 1964.
Well, yes, if that scrap of desert wasn't super-duper special to a multiple religious nutjobs then the situation would be simpler.
Of course even if that was once true it is n longer true, moreover Israeli can make political/diplomatic mistakes almost freely- there is literally almost no downside because the Palestinians have shown repeatedly that they are incapable of capitalizing when Israel does screw up.
One reason that Israel has and has maintained the upperhand all these decades is that the Pales continually make tactical mistakes- for instance, the wave of attacks after Rabin's assassination in the run up to the next election was a staggeringly appallingly awful tactical and strategic mistake- right up there with the rejection of the original UN partition plan.
Explain please?
And in China.
"MacArthur did not advocate the use of nuclear weapons to recover the situation.[81][82] In his testimony before the Senate Inquiry, he said that he had never recommended their use.[83] In 1960, MacArthur challenged a statement by Truman that he had wanted to use nuclear weapons, and Truman issued a retraction, stating that he had no documentary evidence of this claim; it was merely his personal opinion"
So, maybe, but not publicly in any event.
I still want to know why the ump is wearing a sweater.
It just makes no sense to fact check a point that's open to several interpretations. Kessler admits that Obama's comment is accurate when viewed in the context of the current tax rates remaining on the books, and since that was the GOP position he was negotiating against, it's a perfectly fair comparison. IOW, the compromise that passed will reduce the deficit by $700B as compared to the rates that most republicans wanted. Moreover, he criticizes Obama for framing the deal as a victory when it wasn't exactly what he or the Democrats wanted. Huh? That's not a statement that needs to be factchecked in any way, shape, or form, and it's absurd to suggest that Obama should have said "well, I didn't get 100% of what I wanted and therefore I failed."
Kessler even says at the end that he wasn't sure whether to give him any pinocchios, but just decided to anyway because his statement sounds "paradoxical" and he's being "too clever." I'd call that projection.
I still want to know why folks considered the cartoon to be "unduly inflammatory".
It looks like a jacket with cuffs to me.
And dress shoes.
Today a different group of violent lunatics wants to commit further genocide and finish what the Nazis started.
If there's much of anything in the world that isn't right, this is it.
I'm not Jewish but my father had some Holocaust survivors for friends. Their stories, which included those of a small boy who escaped the Nazis by crawling out from under a pile of his dead relatives and then hid in a forest until American troops finally arrived, a man who suffered bizarre painful medical experiments, two men who were tortured, and a woman who was raped not only for more times but for more days than she could count have made me very sympathetic to Israel. There are, of course, over six million other reasons as well.
Leaving out that they are the only democracy in the Middle East and our only ally there, Israel deserves our support in the name of justice not only because of what happened before but also to make damned sure that it never, ever happens again.
I don't know that we can assume that it's the ump. It could be a William Ligue situation and the pitcher is trying to save the day by taking him out with a baseball to the temple.
And if you mean "ethnic cleansing", it is happening again. Right now, to the Palestinians.
It's laughable that we in the US call this the Israel/Palestine conflict, as if there were two equal parties. The Isreali position is so dominant that there is only really one party to the conflict. The only thing that will resolve it is Israel choosing to resolve the conflict themselves, or international pressure finally getting so great that the choice is forced upon them. The Palestinians have always been irrelevant.
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