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kava

@ kava @lemmy.world

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3 yr. ago

  • Ukraine says it cracked open a Russian decoy drone used to fool air defenses and found Western parts inside

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  • if you look at my history it isn't particularly pro-israeli

    it's just that in this specific context, I don't think it's as significant as it may seem on first reading. Israel has had a long relationship of cooperation with Russia. Although lately things have gotten more tense between the two, with Iran and Russia becoming closer. Iran is Israel's mortal enemy and Russia supplying money and tech transfer over in exchange for Shaheeds is a big no-no for them

    so while yes, there probably are pro-Russian elements in the Israeli state that have probably helped Russia circumvent sanctions and export controls.. the brunt of their materials probably comes from China, from European sources, and maybe even American companies themselves.

  • Ukraine says it cracked open a Russian decoy drone used to fool air defenses and found Western parts inside

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  • russia doesn't need Israeli help to get access to American parts

    All the way back in the Cold War the Soviets had a governmental department specifically to source parts from the West that was blocked off to sanctions. They have decades of experience creating shell companies, intermediaries, etc.

    if someone wants to do more research the parent organization was "First Main Directorate of the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers" and the department was called "Directorate T: Scientific and Technical Intelligence" sometimes referred to as just "Line X"

    so basically the Russians have had many decades of experience circumventing sanctions and export controls. The Russians, while a shell of the former USSR, still have a lot of the human capital and base of experience in this regard.

    I remember reading an article on Reuters or Washington Post or something where apparently even after sanctions, the Russians are getting roughly 90% of the high-tech components they were getting before the war. So the sanctions have hurt, but by a marginal amount. I think it's this article: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/western-industrial-components-rebuilding-russias-military-2024-08-16/ but Reuters is now paywalled for me

  • Incoming Trump admin is eyeing new immigrant detention centers near major U.S. cities

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  • i'm not ready to say we'll kill them yet. for example we stuck Japanese in camps but didn't kill them. sure, we took all their property and whatnot.

    but you're right that it's concerning because remember the Nazis originally did not mean to kill the Jews. Initially they meant to deport them out of the country.

    They created the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the early 1930s which was meant to facilitate the process of Jews leaving the country voluntarily (at least at first) and also by force. Sort of like our modern ICE

    One big idea before the decision to exterminate was to send them all to Madagascar. They seriously explored this idea in the late 1930s but realized it was logistically impractical to transport such a large number of people.

    Some enterprising Jews managed to float the idea of returning Jews to British Palestine - and they collaborated with the Nazis to get 60k Jews out of Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

    But eventually they realized, around 1941, that the easiest way to deal with the Jewish Question would just be to industrially exterminate the Jews

    this entire process lasted about a decade give or take a couple years.

    my main concern is this: let's say they start this process. they make the camps, they put hundreds of thousands in said camps. but then they realize they don't have the money, will, or logistical capacity to actually continue through with it

    what happens then? that's the key question. in the beginning, exterminating is out of the question. it sounds absurd.

    but over time, as the situation gets normalized, the overton window shifts. then you mix in economic crisis and war... the idea of extermination starts to look less and less absurd

  • Incoming Trump admin is eyeing new immigrant detention centers near major U.S. cities

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  • https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/cbsnews_20240609_1.pdf

    That's a link to a CBS / YouGov poll taken in June of this year.

    If you scroll down to question number 62, you'll see this

    1. Would you favor or oppose the U.S. government starting a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally

    Favor . . . . . . . . 62% Oppose . . . . . . . . 38%

    That's a national poll taken of all registered voters, so not just Republicans.

    Majority of the people in this country support mass deportation of all illegal immigrants. Majority of the people in this country support a policy that would

    • require dozens of camps near all urban areas to house tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people
    • require the federal government to dramatically increase the size of ICE, having to hire tens of thousands of additional officers
    • that beefed up federal agency would have to search through all urban areas and stop individuals to inspect their paperwork
    • those individuals who are caught will have to spend many months if not years in a concentration camp detention center

    Consider this. There are anywhere between 10~15 million illegals in this country. Let's call it 12,500,000. How many seats does an Airbus A321 hold? (fairly standard and common passenger aircraft) About ~200 give or take 30 or so.

    So, how many back and forth flights would you need to send 12.5M people back to their country of origin at 200 people per flight?

    That's 62,500 flights. The largest passenger airline in the US, American Airlines, has a fleet size of 970. Let's call it 1,000 (you can find this on their wiki page)

    It would then take all of American Airlines roughly 60 days to move all illegals out of this country, assuming 100% capacity on each and every single flight.

    So in a best case scenario, assuming the US federal government was somehow able to emulate the total logistical capacity of the largest passenger airline, it would take 2 months to move all of these people.

    Now consider this is the federal government that could not even properly create a floating pier in Gaza: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5050708/what-went-wrong-with-the-u-s-built-floating-pier-designed-to-get-aid-into-gaza

    Just some numbers as food for thought. Majority of Americans support placing and keeping millions of people in camps for years.

    Living through this, it doesn't surprise me at all how most Germans did not care about what happened to the Jews

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    well at least the cycle has stopped

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  • i guess the implication is that he puts more blame on the voters, as that is what his comments are mainly focused on.

    me personally I don't blame the voters at all. just like I don't blame the German public for voting in the Nazis.

    humans are stupid herd animals who will elect strongmen when they feel weak and scared.

    i believe you can only put blame on people that have autonomy. and the only people with any real autonomy in this country are the elites, which have stuck their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand for far too long.

    the pressure pot is cooking and I think it's too late to stop it. maybe if we were a little less greedy over the last few decades and a little less focused on the short term, we could have skipped this resurgence of fascism that we're about to live through

    but politicians only care about the next election and corporations only care about the next quarter. we are a short term society and have sacrificed the long term health of our country

  • Far-right Israeli minister orders preparations for West Bank annexation

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  • You’re still supporting evil, even if it’s the lesser evil.

    this is rather why i like the quote from ZIzek i heard in an interview recently

    "if i were an American, I would obviously vote for Kamala. No question. But before I go into the booth, I would make the Christian Catholic cross with my hands and beg God for forgiveness"

    i voted for Kamala but I did it with an awful taste in my mouth. Of course, just like all humans are guilty of Eden's original sin.. I think all of us Americans are guilty of benefiting from imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and the spoils of genocide.

  • Far-right Israeli minister orders preparations for West Bank annexation

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  • games like EU4 simulate it pretty well

    when you first take a territory, it requires infamy. other countries look at you with sideways. you can't extract the full value out of the land yet. but after a long period of time (upwards of 50 years) it slowly starts to become legitimized. especially as you import settlers and built population centers. after a long enough time, it's both de facto and de jure yours and if you hold it long enough people will recognize it as yours.

    so look what happened with West Bank. when Israel took control of WB in 1967, it was majority Palestinian.

    what did they do? first, you import settlers. you give incentives for people to come and populate the area with Jews. you also tacitly endorse the ideology of the settlers, so they do it even without you actively supporting it (so you have some semblance plausible deniability when people call you out)

    then, you take the native peoples and you herd them into smaller and smaller pieces of land. you restrict movement (like through their "jewish only roads" and the many checkpoints through the WB) (edit: sound similar to what Americans did to another native peoples by chance? almost like it was a blueprint)

    fast forward to today, and now 63% of the land area of West Bank is majority Jewish. The Palestinian population is still higher, but they are forced into smaller and smaller pieces of low-value land. In about 50 years or so they've managed to turn a majority Arab area into a majority Jewish.

    this gives them legitimacy. there's no way some future government, even if they wanted to be more generous, would ever give up majority Jewish land.

    I'd say the entire process is gonna take ~75 years or so. we're almost to its conclusion. they're gonna replicate their WB strategy in Gaza, but since Gaza is much smaller and they're being much more brutal about it, it'll go much faster

    I think the best way to become more resistant to propaganda is to read and understand history. If you only pay attention to this conflict since Oct 7th and you are getting your entire media diet from certain dubious sources, you don't stand a chance.

    but if you deep dive and actually look at the history. look at the beginning of the state of Israel, look at the early leaders, what they were saying, what they believed. look at the process of occupation, what the policies have been (ethnic cleansings population transfers, restriction of movement, blockade of gaza, destruction of airports, killing of journalists, etc)

    then you will have a more cynical eye when certain people try to twist and bend the truth. and you will be more accurate in predicting where the ball will land.

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    Trump win means ‘time has come’ to annex parts of West Bank, Israeli minister says

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  • the last 80 years has been the slow elimination and annexation of palestine

    it really doesn't matter which pro-Israeli US presidential candidate serves for the next 4

  • Far-right Israeli minister orders preparations for West Bank annexation

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  • they've been self-defensing their way towards the total elimination and annexation of Palestine from the 1940s to now.

    this whole thing really should not surprise anyone that knows even a simplified history of god's special country. they have been slowly and steadily inching towards their goal. they're not really shy about it.

    hear it from Israel's first prime minister

    "You are no doubt aware of the JNF's activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin." He added: "Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale."

    "With compulsory transfer we have a vast area... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."

    Here's another guy, a director of the JNF, Joseph Weitz

    "There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

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    well at least the cycle has stopped

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  • why are y’all scared of taking responsibility for allowing a Nazi to gain power when you decided to not vote

    I voted for Kamala but I still blame the DNC

    the issue is two fold

    a) they played games with democracy, further accelerating the erosion of whatever little faith remains in our democracy institutions. there should have been a primary, not the underhanded switcharoo we got to witness where for the first time in US history since primaries were a thing.. we had a presidential candidate nominated without a single vote

    b) while voters are struggling and going through a period of profound insecurity - not only financially but in a very real social sense - they offer more of the same. neoliberal status quo. people are desperate for change and the DNC offers them nothing.

    you blame the voters but you do not want to put an ounce of blame on the party that would rather lose an election than offer meaningful change

  • I'm feeling like just hiding in bed for the next 4 years. Friends on Lemmy, got any advice for us Americans coping with the oncoming shit show that is the Trump GOP takeover?

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  • i grew up an illegal immigrant in the US. we were poor and struggled but ultimately I had a good upbringing and I have a good life now.

    the world is uncaring and unjust. you have to stick up for yourself and build something for you and the ones you love. nobody else will do it for you.

    unless you are a silver spoon trust fund baby of course (which isn't exclusive to any race or gender.. although being straight & white definitely increases the chances). most of us don't get that privilege

  • Bernie Sanders: Vote Harris because Gaza is ‘not the only issue’

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  • Statement: government in Ukraine changed in 2014.

    Your response: that new government had the support of the people, therefore that statement is false

    This is a non-sequitor. The government either changed or it didn't. Whether the people supported it or not doesn't fundamentally change the statement.

    I'm starting to think you are a bot, someone with very low reading comprehension, or simply a malicious actor.

    If you refuse to engage in this attempt to reach a set of facts we can agree on, then we will never move forward.

    I could say the sky is blue and the grass is green and you would yell me I am justifying capitalism's embrace of carbon emissions and the death of the climate.

  • I'm feeling like just hiding in bed for the next 4 years. Friends on Lemmy, got any advice for us Americans coping with the oncoming shit show that is the Trump GOP takeover?

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  • my dad always taught me not to let the workings of the world affect my personal mood

    even if the world is going to shit, you can carve out a little slice of life for yourself and the people you love. take care of those people, take care of what you own, do the things you're passionate about and let God worry about the rest

    and I say that as an atheist. it's a metaphor

  • Bernie Sanders: Vote Harris because Gaza is ‘not the only issue’

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  • ok let's go over piece by piece to try and again reach a base set of facts we can agree on

    I’m mostly curious if and why you think Russia had the right to invade.

    i don't think Russia had a right to invade. i do recognize, however, that idealistic platitudes doesn't ultimately matter in the dynamics between nation-states. russia believed, for a confluence of factors, that invading was the correct decision and therefore they made that decision.

    i'm not making any moral judgements. if it were up to me we'd all be singing Kumbaya, nuclear weapons would all be dismantled, and we'd live in a communist utopia. i don't get to decide though. i only get to be a third party observer, doing the best i can to arrive at the closest version of the truth

    what i am doing, along with you, is discussing the material conditions that led to this war and the nature of the dynamic between both ukraine and russia and the ukrainian war relative to recent history

    A & B: Ukraine has had an election since 2014 so apparently there’s public support for a western friendly government.

    Ok let's once again reiterate what started this inquiry

    “the ukrainian war is in a way a war of independence”

    a) the ukrainian government had a radical change overnight due to a violent protest/revolution/coup

    the fact that Ukraine had an election since 2014 and that there is public support for a western friendly government does not change that there was an abrupt change in government in 2014. these things are not connected

    just because people supported the French revolution, doesn't mean it wasn't a violent revolution, correct?

    b) the old government was pro-russian, the new government was anti-russian

    once again, the fact that the old government (president being Viktor Yanukovych) was pro-Russian does not change whether or not there was an election post-2014 and that there is public support for a western friendly government

    neither a) nor b) change based on your statement. so please

    do you agree or disagree with A) and B)? they are objective statements of fact. easily provable or disprovable. can we agree to a base line reality? if we can, we can move forward

    C: preparing to defend yourself from invasion doesn’t justify invading

    "the new ukrainian government realized that Russia was about to invade because of this radical change and therefore they prepared for war by bending the knee to the US"

    we are not talking about justification. the statement c) states that the new Ukrainian government, post Euromaidan, recognized they were about to be invaded and immediately started cooperating with the US.

    again, objective statement of fact. you either agree or don't agree.

    if you cannot state "Yes this is true" or "No this is false because xyz" then you are not actually saying anything and I'm going to assume you are not discussing in good faith

    i'm making every effort here to be generous to you

  • One in five Americans do not think Hitler was all bad: Poll

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  • i dont want to sound like a moral relativist and i'm hesitant to respond because i also don't want to be a hitler apologist

    but I think it's really hard to categorize a person into a "totally bad" position. for example, Hitler had a big ego but he probably genuinely wanted the best for Germany. He cared for animals, was a vegetarian (for the most part, especially in later years of life) and advocated for animal cruelty laws.

    if he genuinely believed that eliminating the jews was necessary in order to secure the autonomy of the German people, does that make him a bad person? To a Nazi, the Jew is an evil parasite on society that needs to be eliminated for the good of the entire population.

    now please understand I'm speaking from their perspective not saying it is correct

    but this type of anti-semitic ideology did not spring up spontaneously in the 1930s but was something deep that developed over the course of hundreds of years and ultimately culminated in the genocide we saw

    but if for example, we took everyone in this thread and raised them in 1890s Germany- how many of them would believe in tolerance and racial equality? I'd honestly be surprised if there was a single person

    I don't know. I understand there are good things and bad things. but the difference between good and bad people is more complicated. bad people i typically relegate to those individuals that get pleasure of out cruelty or suffering

  • One in five Americans do not think Hitler was all bad: Poll

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  • another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.

    i'd lean towards "i don't know enough about the facts to make a definitive statement"

    public education isn't great and even good public education rarely dives deeply in the life of Adolf Hitler beyond the obvious "he was a megalomaniac dictator who killed Jews and wanted to take over the world"

    Hitler became Hitler because of his life experiences. He served in the German military during WW1, he was homeless in Vienna, he grew up poor with a sick mother. These events, along with the movements of the then-current cultural zietgiest, radicalized him in certain directions. It's a complex story that is hard to break down into simplistic moral platitudes of "good person" or "bad person"

  • Bernie Sanders: Vote Harris because Gaza is ‘not the only issue’

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  • we are discussing the material conditions that led up to the war. we have agreed together here that

    a) the ukrainian government had a radical change overnight due to a violent protest/revolution/coup

    b) the old government was pro-russian, the new government was anti-russian

    c) the new ukrainian government realized that Russia was about to invade because of this radical change and therefore they prepared for war by bending the knee to the US

    so let's circle back to the statement that started this line of inquiry

    "the ukrainian war is in a way a war of independence"

    so instead of going off on tangents all over the place, can we circle back to that statement. now that we have agreed on a) b) and c), does the statement in bold seem true or false to you?

    let's ignore who has fallen for whatever propaganda and try to agree on a base set of facts and draw some conclusions we can agree on. if you disagree with a) b) or c) please specifically state what part of that statement is false and we can each present evidence and reasoning.

    i fully intend to show to you i am speaking in good faith and i assume you are as well

  • Bernie Sanders: Vote Harris because Gaza is ‘not the only issue’

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  • Which countries would you be fine with russia invading if they win in Ukraine

    why do you assume i am fine with Russia invading anywhere?

    I'm making a point about the dynamics of the war.

    How about this-

    Do you think it's a coincidence the invasion happened less than 4 days after the new government was appointed (unconstitutionally)? Why do you think that new government immediately started cooperating with the CIA? It's because they knew Russia was about to invade them. Because they understood their position.

    this type of autonomic response you have to somebody simply dispassionately discussing the material conditions which caused this war is quite interesting. reminds me of the anti-israel / anti-semitic tick

  • Bernie Sanders: Vote Harris because Gaza is ‘not the only issue’

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  • japan is a sovereign nation too. one that doesn't get to decide whether a foreign power from across the pacific ocean gets to park military bases in their land.

    there's a long spectrum from totally under control -> totally independent and you will find that virtually every smaller country is rarely totally independent

    i'd like to challenge you and show me one thing i said that was false. it's easy to throw shade say something like "everything you are saying is because you have fallen for propaganda, whereas me I am pure and untouched by propaganda"

    russia was content with Ukraine being loosely coupled. They were not OK with Ukraine totally leaving the Russian sphere and joining the west. this is what triggered the invasion of Crimea and the little green men from the east.

    you can see a similar, albiet different, dynamic with Taiwan and China. China is content (for now) with Taiwan remaining sort-of independent. but once the US for example says something "Taiwan is an independent country" they would invade.