If you must masturbate in a thread, I would thank you to do it in response to someone else’s post, or as a free-standing post of your own.
Laughing at ignorance is almost as blissful as fighting it…
Idiocy abounds in the human condition, knock yourself out
Photoshop.
Out of curiosity, what is your point in posting that particular picture? It doesn’t work as a tu quoque against liberals because there’s nothing in it to indicate that they’re liberals.
Israel is killing a lot of Hamas members. Sounds like they even got one of their higher-ups.
As much as I may support Israel and it’s right to defend itself, I also believe that this may be one of those situations where nothing can be gained in a sense.
Israel kills top Hamas leader…another younger Hamas member steps up and fills his shoes. It appears that there really isn’t a way out of this cycle of bloodshed. The flow of Palestinians into the Hamas organization seems to be keeping pace with the rate of their extermination.
Egypt’s best interest is in marginalizing Hamas as well. Egypt’s government currently sees other actors as bigger threats to it than Israel and wants a peace deal between Israel and an independent Palestinian entity - the days of their benefiting from the Israeli boogeyman are long past.
Retaliating for Hamas’s rocket attacks was not of no value - it was necessary to show a consequence and to somewhat degrade the ability to attack with better and better rockets - but any action quickly reaches not only diminishing returns but to the level of being counterproductive.
Israel’s achievable goals do not include destroying Hamas or of punishing Gazans for supporting Hamas so much that they toss them out (the immorality of that tactic aside). The cost of creating anarchy in Gaza is greater to Israeli interests than any concievable benefit.
Instead the achievable goals for Israel are: to degrade Hamas’s ability to launch more effective attacks; to motivate another longer term truce without enabling Hamas’s ability to become a more effective adversary in the future in return; and to marginalize Hamas as a player in the Arab world, to the Palestinian people as a whole, and even to the Gazans in particular.
The first two or three days of military action alone would have gone a long way to achieving the first two goals and further military action only goes against achieving the last. Hamas views deaths of Gazan citizens as a resource in their quest for significance and the Israeli government should by now know better than to be goaded and taunted into providing them that resource any more than is absolutely necessary. And some real significant concessions to the Fatah led side of the fence would also serve well to marginalize Hamas.
Unfortunately, I think, domestic political concerns are coloring the decisions made by Israeli leadership.
Um, didn’t you read the post? “Idiocy abounds?” Looks like a photo of idiots to me…
It was posted in response to a picture of right wing rednecks at a pro-war rally holding up a sign saying “Get a brain! Morans.” It appeared to be weirddave’s idea of a rebuttal to “stupid conservatives” photo.
Eh- you guys have history. I didn’t see it that way. No worries.
No , pearl harbor was one of a number of attacks/invasions that the japanese were conducting to secure their war objectives. The raid itself was to demonstrate visibly to the American public that the navy and army airforce was taking the war back to Japan.
Realistically speaking , the Hiroshima bomb would have been a proportionate response had it been delivered on kobe or one of the other japanese harbors with a comparable fleet presence.
Declan
It was my idea of one example of “Idiocy abounds in the human condition”, as demonstrated by stupid signs. Like the “morans” and “kill all juice” signs. Nothing more and noting less. Your reaction to a throw away post of a funny photograph speaks volumes to your prejudices, posting bias and blind partisanship*.
*In before “Ha! I’m not a member of any party!”
Well, you’ve had your chance to research it . . . . do you still claim that the Israeli settlers took the “best land”?
Where Is Israel Going? | HuffPost The World Post Heres an Israeli who thinks the attack is a bad mistake. It has all the earmarks of Iraq. Making enemies in several countries at the same time, is hardly a gain. There was a chance for Israel to get a measure of quiet acceptance. That is gone now. They will be back to being the militarily aggressive bully who shows little regard for life. It was a horrible mistake.
Israel needs to be a little careful, because to date it has actually had tacit acceptance, if not approval, from other countries like Egypt. If it treats the Palestinians with too heavy a hand, it will lose that.
The Middle East is changing. There are now Arab countries that are trying to join the global economy, and are becoming more tolerant of Israel. Iran is starting to be seen as a more dangerous force against Arabs than is Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are now discovering that they are not getting the automatic support of other Middle Eastern nations when they screw with Israel.
This is a great opportunity for Israel to build more bridges into the Arab world and to gain acceptance. So it must walk a very careful line in Gaza. On the one hand, indiscriminate rocket attacks cannot be tolerated and should not be, but on the other hand there is such a great disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians that it must respond with measured force.
I’d question your choice of verb tense.
Here’s a video of a demonstration which apparently took place yesterday in the Netherlands:
Anyone want to guess that that means in English?
Let me guess: Hamas wished death on someone, so they should be banned from the SDMB.
People called Jews go the house?