Panto_Villan

1 hour ago, Jareth said:

Ok then also look at why Netanyahu is not immediately implementing the US plan. 

Nah, I’m done. You’re still being evasive.

At the end of the day if you believe the IDF have known where all the hostages are for months and are deliberately choosing not to free them, you’ll believe anything.

10 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Google it dude, it’s mainstream news

I’m well aware of the protests. They want the hostages returned safely - so it’s clearly a politically popular cause in Israel. Yet you’re arguing the notoriously self-serving Netanyahu deliberately chose not to free them militarily even though the IDF could have done so.

That’s why I’m asking you to spell out your logic, because there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of it in your position. You’re just implying that freeing the hostages would have been unpopular and refusing to explain why.

4 minutes ago, Jareth said:

For the same reason all of the families think so and protest about it regularly 

Maybe spell it out for all us idiots who think the families and Israeli voters would rather have the hostages home and well rather than in Hamas captivity?

Just now, Jareth said:

The guy should already be in prison for corruption - literally should be in prison. He has worked against a peace process his entire career - yet now we are to believe the hostages are more important to him than his life long goals? Israelis are protesting about this. What am I blind to hear?

Because rescuing the hostages benefits him politically, making it more likely he stays out of prison. Even if he doesn’t care about them, the Israeli voters do.

Why would you think otherwise?

13 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Netanyahu, in his own words, in the recent past has ensured that money flows to Hamas because Hamas = one state solution. The guy is a sociopath, yet you feel he cares about the hostages? He has no empathy whatsoever, only concern for himself. Israel needs him gone before anything can change. 

If he has concern only for himself, why would he make himself spectacularly unpopular at home (likely ending his political career, which will get him jailed for fraud) by deliberately refusing to rescue the hostages just to give Israel an excuse to bomb Palestinians?

An excuse they clearly don’t need anyway? Why would he not just rescue the hostages and reap the domestic political rewards, then continue to bomb Gaza anyway as part of the war against Hamas?

There’s no point even pointing this stuff out, is there? You’re willing to uncritically believe anything negative about Israel, even if it contradicts all the other negative things about Israel that you already believe.

27 minutes ago, Jareth said:

The tweet implies genocide? The ICJ ordered Israel to stop genociding. What’s guy Pearce saying otherwise? They literally just evaporated a school. 

When people say Netanyahu’s priority isn’t the safety of the hostages, it’s because there was a discussion after Oct 7 about whether Israel would go hard after Hamas despite the risks for the hostages that would entail, or negotiate to try and get them released safely. Obviously he went for the former (not really surprising given the scale of Oct 7th).

That absolutely does not mean he wouldn’t take the opportunity to militarily rescue the hostages given the chance. The idea he knew exactly where the hostages were but deliberately chose not to rescue them just so he had an excuse to bomb Palestinians (despite the huge domestic political costs) is Nazi moon base levels of conspiracy thinking.

I mean, of course they didn’t know where all the hostages were. They didn’t know thousands of Hamas fighters were going to flood across the border but they’re omniscient enough to know where 250+ hostages were in the chaos that followed?

12 minutes ago, Jareth said:

The hostages are not Netanyahu’s priority. Never have been. 

No, they’re not. But that’s a billion miles away from anything implied in that tweet.

7 hours ago, Jareth said:

Is he wrong?

Of course it’s wrong. The hostages still being in captivity is one of the biggest issues in Israeli politics and one of the main reasons why the current government has lost so much popularity.

The idea that Netanyahu of all people is throwing away his political future to give Israel an excuse to bomb Palestinian civilians is absolutely insane (particularly when any critic of Israel will gladly tell you they don’t actually need an excuse to do that).

There’s plenty of evidence that Israel has committed serious war crimes in Gaza. There’s really no need to make up ludicrous scenarios if you want to criticise them for killing Palestinians.

16 minutes ago, DaoDeMings said:

The thing that I think makes Farage/Reform a threat to the Conservative Party is that fundamentally they all share similar interests. As with Trump and the Republican party, if it appears that Reform is galvanizing support better than the Conservatives, the Tories will all happily jump ship as the next best thing that protects their own interests. As much as many Tories like to parrot ideas of 'tradition' and 'heritage', really what they're interested in is money and power. If it looks like Reform offers the best chance to keep themselves and the rest of the wealthy classes happy and in control then I don't think they'd hesitate to let the Conservative Party crash and burn.

I do find it hard to imagine the Conservative Party dying entirely, and I think it probably won't ,but as you said, the possibility does make this election interesting.

Yeah. But to me the threat from Reform is that Farage actually seems to have a clear idea of what he wants to achieve, whereas the Tories are just listlessly sagging in the water after a succession of ineffective leaders with different philosophies.

That’s why I think they’re potentially vulnerable to a takeover - as you say, their MPs have demonstrated they are rather “flexible” when it comes to what they’re prepared to support, and Farage might be more appealing to Conservative Party members than any Tory MP that survives the election.

1 minute ago, chrisp65 said:

What argument am I making? I’m arguing the tories will still be around at the next election, that they won’t be wiped out as suggested. You appear to be agreeing.

That they may adapt is perfectly possible, they always have, it’s how they got their name.

Sure, I largely agree with that - although if the Tories and Reform merge, I’d probably argue that was effectively a new party at that point (even if they wore the skin of the old Tories). I think there’s a low chance of that happening but it’s certainly possible.

8 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Just checked, yep the Republican Party still exists.I haven’t said business always gets its way, there will always be single issues where there are winners and losers.

I guess the one thing with this question, the death of the tory party, we can all check back in three or four years from now and see if they’ve gone.

What argument are you making? In the US there’s no longer a party where money and land has a natural home it can trust, because the Republicans are controlled by one man chasing the populist vote. That’s exactly the scenario you said business wouldn’t allow to happen, isn’t it?

I don’t think it’s that likely the Tories are wiped out; I think worst case for them is probably a merger with Reform. I just don’t think business has the power to stop populists taking over like you seem to be suggesting.

11 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Money and land needs a natural home it can trust, fundamentally.

Reform Ltd., can’t be that home it is controlled by one man prone to chasing the populist vote. Yes, he might divi up the NHS for them, but next year he might  suddenly be in to rent reform or clamping down on business fraud. They may well need to co opt the appealing ideas in to Toryism, but they certainly won’t be deciding to disband. 

The tories are being taught a lesson by the binary thinkers. It’ll all be to play for in 5 years time with people telling us to vote Labour again as they will be drifting slightly left if they win a second term.

They’ll be the middle ground, between the bring back hanging and machines guns at Dover of Reform. Or the no hand outs, BUPA NHS, running the country like my toolmaker dad ran the household economy Labour.

 

People said this about Trump in a country where money buys more political influence than anywhere else.

I mean - if business always got their way, we wouldn’t have had Brexit.

8 hours ago, Chindie said:

Ah, I had too much faith in you. Silly me.

You're wrong. The conservative party isn't coming to it's end, no matter how much you say it, no matter how much you want it, no matter how much you think you're right.

They're going to get a shoeing in the polls, maybe a historic one, but they'll be back. Their fundamental existential touchstones aren't going away (if anything a number became unassailably engrained, hence why the Labour party agrees with them on so much). They'll spend their decade in the cold, they'll reinvent again, Labour will shit themselves, gorge too much, the narrative on what they are will flip, Tories come back with some new curtains.

So I think this view is correct in most cases, but part of the reason for this is that there’s never really been any significant party on the right that might displace them. 

A lot therefore depends on how well Reform does. The tories have historically been able to ignore parties like UKIP because their vote share and number of seats has been so much higher, but Reform doing well at the same time as the Tories doing very badly might shift that balance.

Given FPP that’s a slim chance, admittedly, but I think it still makes this election unusual.

Nobody should care how many children Israel has actually killed. All the evidence of the misfiring Hamas rocket at that hospital can’t have existed at all.

Nice to see people saying what they really think - facts aren’t relevant when criticising Israel.

4 minutes ago, limpid said:

US politics isn't left / right, it's right / righter, but we are discussing that Labour is shifting further left because of a position about Palestine. I don't get it.

At the risk of repeating myself - Starmer is shoring up support from the left of his party by being more overtly pro-Palestine, because very left people also tend to be very pro-Palestine.

If you want the historical reason for that, it’s because very left people tended to side with the Soviets rather than the US in the Cold War, and therefore Israel is a right-wing cause and Palestine is a left-wing cause (much more nuanced than that in practice but that’s the core of the issue.)

So one thing that’s potentially really interesting about the election is RFK Jr and how many states he’s able to get onto the ballot for.

I’ve seen stats saying he takes equal voters from Dems and Republicans, but I can’t believe that - the man is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist nut job. Surely he’d take way more votes from the Republicans?

9 hours ago, limpid said:

When did Palestine become a left / right issue?

Have the Palestinians been proposing communism or fascism? I can't even see how this would break down on the auth / lib axis.

Israel has been propped up by the US military for most of its existence. For a long time the question was a reasonable proxy of “what do you think about the US military-industrial complex?” and historically there’s a clear left / right divide on that question.

Not all good news, unfortunately. Ukraine continuing to slowly lose territory in the Donbas.

With all eyes on Kharkiv, Russian troops take one Donbas village after another .

"We are losing every day little by little – somewhere we regained a little, somewhere they took, but we lost much more than we gained.”

https://kyivindependent.com/with-all-eyes-on-kharkiv-russian-troops-take-one-donbas-village-after-another/

3 hours ago, villa89 said:

Like I said above it's ridiculous. Either NATO countries have some bizarre, unfounded fear of Russia or, it suits them to prolong the war, leave Ukraine hanging out to dry and gain a lot of much needed workers in EU countries. 

1 hour ago, Captain_Townsend said:

Why are you bringing the EU into it? It's more likely NATO have calculated (and I obviously disagree with them if this is the case as I am ultra pro Ukraine) that it is better to bog  and grind Russia down in a war they cannot win/stalemate rather than swiftly drive them out where they may regroup and try elsewhere or try something differently.

This is all coming from the US, not anyone else. They’re putting pressure on Ukraine not to use any foreign weapons against Russian territory, even if the donor country have said it’s fine.

That’s because the US fears escalation, not because they have a master plan where they want to grind Russia down; a short war where Russia had been swiftly defeated would have suited the West much better.

Ultimately it’s probably because the US will need to do most of the legwork if a full-blown war with Russia kicks off. That’ll cost lots of money and American lives even though they’d win - and it’ll give other opponents like China and Iran a chance to act in other regions while the US is busy fighting Russia. And that’s ignoring any chance of a nuclear exchange, which is small but will still factor into American thinking.

I think they’re being over cautious but, to be fair, history is littered with examples of powerful countries rushing into wars they think will be easy to win and then getting bogged down.

13 hours ago, tinker said:

Russia will have to start defending itself over a much larger area with this move, maybe it will disrupt their supply lines into the battle area before they even get out of Russia. Be nice to see some Russian infrastructure hit as well, power generation etc.

Unfortunately at the moment the restrictions have only been lifted in a very specific area near Kharkiv, and it doesn’t even include say hitting the airbases from which the Russians are firing glide bombs at Ukraine from.

Hopefully it’s a precursor to a wider lifting of restrictions, but right now it’s very much a baby step.

5 hours ago, magnkarl said:

Without the Taurus, that isn't really doing much though. What has Germany delivered which has that sort of range? Ukraine would need to drive their PzH2000 very close to the border for this to be a reality. Maybe German made smart excalibur 155 rounds can get to about 55kms, that isn't very far into Russia.

It's Scholz Scholzing around, as the Germans say.

The German equivalent of the HIMARS (MARS-2) has a decent range, I believe.

10 hours ago, Genie said:

The embarrassment of selling his empire to pay off his fines is hopefully coming up soon. Then Melania leaving him.

Problem is he’s going to make a sickening amount of money from Truth Social in six months (or whenever he can sell his shares).

For a while the stock price was dropping and it looked like he’d “only” make a few hundred million - but the price has risen hugely since then, despite the company having basically no revenue. His share is literally worth billions these days.

2 hours ago, sne said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/28/spying-hacking-intimidation-israel-war-icc-exposed

Long article.

Yeah, read that earlier. It’s dirty (and seemingly pretty incompetent) stuff, and seems to have seriously backfired in this case.

Like, if you’re worried this prosecutor might want to open an investigation into your country, why not also give them and their colleagues a personal reason to hate you? Good job, lads.

I’m sure a lot of countries collect intelligence on officials from the ICC and UN and other such organisations, but I can’t imagine many go to the lengths of clumsily threatening them in hotel rooms etc.

Real or Barca. Wouldn't expect to beat them, and hopefully we wouldn't need to in order to get out of the group.

But imagine if we did.