This, one-hundred-million percent. It's been basically the only logical arguement since the day they picked him up and started leaking all sorts of contradictory nonsense.
I'm not wholly convinced by this, but if this was the case Kirk makes a sensible target.
He's always at massive events with little serious security, it ties into Israeli fears of violence on campuses, his a high profile pundit but not really an 'activist' in any kind of essential role for the MAGA/international fascist project.
But most of all, while still being a pro-Israel ghoul, he's been pissing off Israeli hardliners the last month or so. He stated that some of the crackdowns on any anti-Israel sentiment go too far and risk his sacred 'free speech'. He was entertaining the idea publicly that Epstein was being run by Mossad. He's been on Megan Kelly's show and others to talk about how the Israeli hardliners on the right are going too far in attacking him, pushing people like him away, saying they're overly paranoid etc. Apart from getting some ultra-hardcore-zionist backlash on social media for that there's been a couple of critical articles of him in places like The Times of Israel in recent months too.
So if Israel or someone associated with it we're going to pick an 'ally' to use for something like that, he'd be a good choice.
The violence in American culture is a cancer that's eating it alive. And for a long time access to money and power helped you protect yourself, isolate yourself from it - whether via security or privacy or your potential enemies having too much too lose - but cancer spreads until it consumed everything if you don't actually fight it. It's nothing new, nothing that wasn't tearing at the majority of the country. It's just spreading to the minority of people who thought it wouldn't spread to them.
I've been banging on this drum here and elsewhere since the first game came out. There's definitely some people on the Hitman writing team with at least a good understanding of parapolitical history and likely actual leftist politics.
There's plenty of main characters and mission plots that relate to real events like the one you mentioned. Dalias Margolis is pretty much straight up Ghislaine Maxwell - they just made her father and actual Israeli general instead of a newspaper owning Mossad spy. Dawood Rangan is almost certainly supposed to be Dawood Ibrahim with his links to terrorism, massive public ego, history of cricket fixing and lower level Mumbai gangster history. Jordan Cross is pretty clearly Jared Leto in looks, personality, and weird nepo-baby intelligence connections through his father. And so on...
By the time you get into the non-target characters and all the little schemes, controversies, and historical backgrounds of characters that NPCs in the crowds talk about the knowledge and references run really deep.
I'm replaying the Mass Effect Trilogy as it's been about 10 years since I last did. Still working my way through the ME1 portion at the moment and it shows its age with pop up text boxes instead of showing some quest outcomes & repeated planet instillations, but it is about to be a 20 year old game (!). It is still absolutely amazing the way they managed to create such a vivid, deep, and fleshed out world & set of characters first time though. The seems in the dialogue system are clunky by today's standards but a good amount of the writing remains amazing for the time & better than a lot of what you get today. The music and art direction still rocks too.
When I haven't had time to sit down and sink a lot of time into a game I've been playing Into The Breach. I really like FTL & still boot it up now and then, but when I bought Into The Breach years ago I just couldn't get into it. For whatever reason though, this time it's really starting to click for me (albeit on Easy for now) especially as I start to discover more of what you can do with movement/attack cancelling etc rather than always trying to clear the board like in other strategy games I play.
He might genuinely be one of the worst liars I've ever seen. Imagine picking paid political punditry when you're a worse liar than a kid with a mouthful of sweets, claiming someone took them.
My great aunt lived in the country and had an amazing pond full of fish and waterlilies, frogs and bugs. She always called these 'pond skaters' because she liked the way they seemed like they were ice skating. During the hotter summers sometimes you'd see a common lizard or two coming out of the cracks in the dry stone walls to bask. That garden was always full of blackberries and cherries to pick too. Growing up skint in the North in the 80s was pretty shit but that place was like a little slice of paradise to me as a kid.
Whilst some of it has been exaggerated by the usual wrecker types (Trimbley, Lansman etc) Corbyn appears to have surrounding himself with a lot of his previous inner circle, including the likes of James James Schneider -- who is good on TV, but had an undeniably moderating influence when Corybn was LOTO and also happens to be married to Keir Starmer's primary spokesperson which is
-- who seem to be mostly siloing themselves off and giving themselves titles rather than working with the newer more combative crop of people, mostly around Zarah Sultana.
Zarah Sultana has been the one going on the attack over the last year, taking legal action against anyone who falsely tries to smear her as an antisemite, and has been unequivocally clear that she's explicitly anti-zionist & rejects the false arguement for a supremecist Jewish state, rather than getting bogged down in liberal zionist talking points.
Corybn then did a widely promoted interview where, when asked about it as he obviously would be, he gave a really shitty, seemingly pissed off at Zarah answer about how it wasn't helpful that she was bringing up that and the way the IHRA antisemitism definition was a trap. It was personally snarky and shitty, he lied about which definition he preferred (claiming he supported one that wasn't put forward until two years later) and gennerally created a massive open goal for press and detractors to run with it as a wedge between them (which increasingly seems real) and obsess over it in the press.
As pointed out elsewhere, there's also some pretty shitty, reactionary people in the orbit of the new party (even if they're not officially candidates yet or anything) which is partly as a result of a lot of the people around Corbyn seemingly pushing hard for a more federated, loose party structure; the benefits of which might be to make alliances with green and independent MPs easier, but the downside is you're likely to get a lot more shitty candidates and people in the wider orbit.
Exactly. Over the last ten years Farage has been on Question Time over 40 times. Corbyn once. And during that time he came within a hair of being Primeminister whilst Farage had less than five MPs total. Farage is a creation of the media & the British establisment.
Definitely some kind of front for corruption, but it's pretty funny that the old guy living in a modest three-bedroom suburban house who is apparently the CEO is called Wagner.
Eh, I'm still in a waiting and see position with the new party, but the early signs aren't great. He's been fucking up again lately when it comes to mounting actual opposition.
This, one-hundred-million percent. It's been basically the only logical arguement since the day they picked him up and started leaking all sorts of contradictory nonsense.