The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military.
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.
I described any democracy in a society with private property. Even without private property, you will have issues with concentrated benefits and diffuse harms–negotiating that is part and parcel with governance.
Iowa businsses petitioning their cause is one thing. OpenAI seagulling in to take a shit in Springfield strikes me as being categorically different.
Viewed from a country with universal healthcare , 18 month’s maternity leave ( my partner just used it ) and so much more, it feels like comparing the US to “any democracy” is like comparing rocks to gold.
While I appreciate the excuse making, the fact is the US is by far and away the richest country to have ever existed, and the average citizen has a much lower quality of life than those in much poorer countries.
It’s a disgrace. Anything else you say is a weak excuse.
The deliberate destruction of a group of people and its culture (completely or partially).
This fits the general description of what Israel has been up to in Palestine since 1948, but especially during the past few years.
Indiscriminate killing of civilians. Planned starvation. Poisoning wells. Denying Palestinians the right to return to their homeland. Forbidding the use of Palestinian cultural symbols. Denying Palestinians the right to fish/conduct business. Keeping them under curfew and surveilling their every move, making them as miserable as possible. Mass imprisonment. Denying Palestinians home-ownership.
Systematically destroying Palestinians and any chance for them to thrive/ found a state/ have human rights.
I see you have replied, but your comment has been marked as dead, so I cannot reply back.
You fed my comment to an AI and based your response on what it said. You said some of the claims were "incorrect".
Let's leave aside how ridiculous it is to fact-check with an LLM. if you go back and read what the AI actually generated, however, you will see that every claim has factual basis, the LLM just marked some as "narrow factual basis", for no particular reason. If it has been documented, it is fact, the LLM is just confused.
Every one of these, when done systematically (and they are) is a component of genocide. About half of them would be enough to constitute genocide on their own.
Displacing more than half of a population (as Israel has done TWICE in history) is definitely genocide.
If you are truly interested in educating yourself, you can start by reading the following wikipedia page (even just the intro):
Genocide definition is: the deliberate, systematic destruction—in whole or in part—of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group
Israel most probably did war crimes (white phosphorus usage seems to be confirmed, while IDF says they have not used it), but I don't think that Israeli has intention to destroy Palestinians. The have intention to destroy Hamas or Hezbollah.
2) Israel has had genocidal plans for Palestinians since before Hamas existed (see the Nakba). In fact, Likud brought Hamas to power, because they saw them as a more fitting opponent than other groups (who were less militant).
3) Israeli politicians (not just current ones) have candidly stated they wish to destroy Palestine, Palestinians, and any chance for them to live in theur homeland
For gods sake, educate yourself. One easy thing to look up is a timeseries of deaths/year of Israelis due to Palestinian violence vs. deaths of Palestinians due to Israeli violence. That should do enough to dispel you of the idea that Palestinians are the terrorists in this case
In this specific case it is something interesting to follow and to analyze. This will definitely have consequences on Russian-Ukrainian war too. UN overall is powerless - there are 7000+ UN peacekeepers in South Lebanon right now. What are they doing there?
I don't understand your point. You contested a fact "legally", but in your opinion the only authority that should have the final "legal" say in the matter is an impartial and weak one.
That's the best we have and it is better than random internet commenters who make judgement like they have a solid evidence of what's going on. Lastly depending on outcome this can be used for more fruitful discussions in the future.
It is not the best we have at all, and the choice is not between random internet commenters and the ICJ. You have the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a plethora of human rights associations.
Why not? There is at least theoretical chance to get some justice regarding Benjamin Netanyahu crimes if they are proved. As well Israel is democracy and can be changed. It is not like Russia where people don't have freedom of word.
Well, considering that the odds of a person on Earth not being a descendant of Abraham is practically zero, why not give Israeli citizenship to everyone? Of course, with special protections for the Jewish people. Then, we can be done with the everlasting conflict.
Getting downvoted by all the emotional people here is not worth it; this thread does not welcome a polite discussion especially from the pro-Israel side. Like in any social media with a voting system (terrible idea, I might add), the vocal and active majority wants to disentivise the disagreement.
I don’t see any pro-Israel side commenter here but me at best. IMHO I do my best to keep discussion as polite as possible having in mind the sensitivity of the topic.
I probably wasn’t clear in the above comment - but what I tried to say is that the thread disincentivizes pro-Israel comments; I am pro-Israel as well and prefer not to engage.
The strict definition of the Geneva conventions does not include forced displacement but in some parts of the world that is included in the definition of. And legality is a matter of tribunal and none has been held so far.
why do we care? there are many other countries around the world that are much worse and we are not sending our soldiers to die there or spending billions of dollars bombing various islands and mountains to fertilize them for next harvest season
Imagine russia or china sponsoring and arming protesters in US. The last time US was actualyl attacked it put 120k japanese people into concentration camps just because they were japanese.
It's ironic that a country ruled by a pedophile and mass child murderer talks about how good or bad another country ruling class is. Wtf look at you own rulers and ruling class before worrying about what other countries rulers are doing. Most of you buy the bullshit of you being the good guys vs them being the bad guys there is no such thing.
Yea, I do wonder, why that might be? Why is a country 1500 miles away, that doesn't even share a common border, preoccupied with the destruction of Israel to the point it invested hundreds of billion of dollars in its offensive capabilities and network of proxies on every side of Israel, had a special paramilitary wing (Quds Force) for operations inside Israel, had a public clock counting down the existence of Israel and called for the destruction of Israel on each and every opportunity?
What's the obsession with the destruction of Israel? Could it be related to the fact that an Islamic Republic of (...) could not accept a Jewish rule right in the middle of the great Muslim Ummah?
Well, for starters just today they hit cental, civilian areas of Beirut with 100 attacks in just 10 minutes - killing more Lebanese civilians in ten minutes than Iran killed Israeli civilians in months of war. Absolutely vile, with clear genocidal intent, and with the aim of stealing Lebanese land.
You are ignoring the elephant in the room: Hezbollah was literally founded in 1982 under IRGC direction; 1,500 Revolutionary Guards deployed to the Bekaa Valley to organize and train it. It is arguably the most successful export of the 1979 revolution's "velayat-e faqih" ideology. So Iran colonized Lebanon.
Hezbollah formally accepts Khamenei as wali al-faqih the supreme juridical authority. That's not alliance, that's religious-political fealty to a foreign head of state.
Iran provides an estimated $700M–$1B/year, plus missiles, drones, training. Without Iran, Hezbollah's strategic arsenal doesn't exist.
It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.
You are ignoring the mammoth on the room: Hezbollah only even exists because of Israeli aggression; murder, rape, land theft, and as we saw yesterday, civilian massacres.
> So Iran colonized Lebanon
They haven't "colonised" anything, and, at best, it's disingenuous to describe training a resistance group as such.
> It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.
To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous! They are stooges, tasked with sitting back and doing nothing while Israel carries out ethnic cleansing and genocide. An MI6 front (Westminster Foundation for Democracy) even has an office inside the Lebanese parliament.
Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist.
"To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous"
Wow, this is quite a take. If Hezbollah doesn't have to respect Lebanon sovereignty
then why does Israel?
"Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist."
This is just a insane conspiracy theory. Hezbollah is the organization that actually partially took over the Lebanese government with Iranian help.
Hezbollah attacks Israel with absolutely no concern for the damage Israels counterattacks will do to Lebanon.
Israel would not be attacking Hezbollah if Hezbollah wasn't attacking Israel. Israel just wants to exist while Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all want to destroy it. Don't expect Israel to just passively accept this. Try to imagine how the US would react to a Mexican cartel shooting rockets at El Paso. I couldn't feel sorry for that cartel when the US counterattacked.
Let me ask you a few questions
1) do you think Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran can defeat Israel with force?
The US and Israel have killed over 3,000 civilians in this war, mostly in Iran and Jordan. Iran has killed like 30. Their attacks are literally a hundredth of what they got and we're still trying to portray them as the bad guys. Don't get me wrong, Iran sucks, but not because of this
Iran has killed thousands of its civilians. The only reason it has only killed a few Israelis (excluding Oct 7) is because they can't easily get past Israeli defenses.
If what you said was true, we'd have seen many, many civilian deaths in Israel over the course of the war - there have, officially, been less than 50 (note that in the same time period Israel - which has targeted civilian infrastructure such as hospitals in Iran - has killed over 3,000 Iranian civilians!).
But what you're saying isn't true - any of it! Iran has been hitting military targets. And they've been using MIRVs, not anti-personell cluster munitions (you know, of the kind Israel has dropped over 1M of over Lebanon). MIRVs split into multiple, independently targetable missiles when high above ground near the target zone. Cluster munitions wait until they are only some meters above ground, and then explode into bomblets.
On April 6, as many as 50 sites were impacted by missiles and their cluster munitions.
“Iranian cluster munitions struck roughly 50 locations across central Israel, wounding at least six, including a seriously wounded woman in Petah Tikva and a moderately wounded man in Ramat Gan,”
Iran has focused on using cluster munitions in its ballistic missile salvos since the first two weeks of the conflict. However, the proportion of these munitions has increased. By March 10, Israel’s Home Front Command said that 50 percent of the Iranian missiles contained cluster munitions.
On April 1, The Times of Israel reported that “12 missiles carrying conventional warheads with hundreds of kilograms of explosives […] struck populated areas in Israel, causing extensive damage. There have also been more than 30 incidents of missiles carrying cluster bomb warheads hitting populated areas, with over 200 separate impact sites.” A ballistic missile attack on April 4, which led to at least 10 impact sites, illustrated how large an area can be affected by one missile with cluster munitions.
Iran is absolutely not using MIRVs. They are only used with nuclear warheads because they are very expensive. Iran is using good old fashioned cluster warheads where the bomblets are randomly dispersed, which is an evil weapon to use against civilians.
You are wrong[0], see Khorramshahr. Maybe Iran found ways to make them more easily produced. And there are videos where you can see missiles splitting into other missiles, some of which go in different directions.
As before, it's Apartheid Israel that uses cluster bombs (and white phosphorus too).
You are wrong if you think Iran is targeting each sub-munition of the ballistic missiles it is firing at Israel civilians. No country has ever used any ballistic missiles that has conventional MIRVs because it simply doesn't make sense.
Iran is far more of an apartheid state because Jews are considered to be Dhimmis and officially discriminated against. Dhimmi status is not equality. Recognized-minority status under the 1979 constitution comes with hard ceilings: Jews cannot hold senior military, judicial, or executive positions; inheritance law historically favored any family member who converted to Islam (a Jew converting could inherit the entire estate from Jewish relatives, a direct incentive structure against the community); testimony of non-Muslims is weighted less in court; blood money (diyya) was unequal until reforms in the 2000s. The reserved Majles seat is one out of 290, tokenism, not representation.
The funny thing is that many Sunnis don't consider Shia to actually be Muslims. Shia twelvers are obsessed with the 12th Imam who they think is still alive after 1150+ years while Sunnis don't care about this at all and consider the entire concept blasphemous.
You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
It’s going to explode, the only question is when.
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