Panto_Villan

Fair enough. Then I agree with you on that.

I’ve quoted the post I was talking about. For this not to be a misleading statement it’s necessary to mention that Hamas made an offer Israel was never realistically going to accept - otherwise it absolutely does read like you’re saying Hamas tried to give the hostages back, but Israel refused to take them back so they could instead kill them and use it as an excuse to prolong the war. If that wasn’t what you actually meant then fine, just clarify it - but that’s pretty clearly what you’ve written there (which is why the post set several people off). Also, I’m aware of the situation around the families of the hostages vs the Israeli government, and I think you’re going way too far claiming the government actively want the hostages dead - I think they’re just more interested in continuing the war than rescuing them, but they’d happily accept them home if the cost was low. But I guess that’s a separate point.

Hmm. Saying “Hamas offered to release the hostages and Israel said no” without mentioning the preconditions is technically true, but I’d say it was still framed in a misleading way. You made it sound like they were just willing to let them go. Obviously, you can debate whether it’s reasonable to expect Israel to trade 200 hostages for what was effectively an end to the war shortly after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis (the offer was made quite early in the war), but imo you definitely need to mention it either way.

To be fair, that’s not the whole story in the first case - the UN accused Hamas of stealing fuel and medical supplies from them about a week back, so I can see why Israel might be reluctant to allow them more. Of course, the UN agency did then walk that accusation back afterwards. But they’re clearly incentivised to do so given that they probably wouldn’t get any more supplies if they didn’t. So I’m not sure what actually happened but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you make out. The second story is more positive. Doesn’t sound like she was treated well during the initial capture but it’s good to hear things have been better since then!

It’s the specific instance where human shields are involved that I think the blame gets murky. If it’s necessary to kill someone because of the threat they pose, but they’ve deliberately put a civilian in danger to try to give themselves an advantage, I think in that situation they are more responsible for the death of the civilian than the person doing the actual killing.

In your view, is “the fair share of the blame” less than what Israel would take?

I’m really pleased he’s starting to look like the player we thought we were getting when we signed him. In my head I had pretty much written him off as a mediocre signing at best. I hope he’s able to maintain this form, but if he’s not then it should ensure we recover more of his value once we part ways.

They were talking about the current bombing campaign though. Most of the discussion at the moment is about that. As the recent court cases are showing, certain members of UK special forces deliberately targeted unarmed children in Afghanistan. It would be misleading (or “sleight of hand”) to then claim that the UK bombing and drone strikes in the Afghanistan campaign were targeted at civilians as a result of that.

I wasn’t trying to engage with your post so it’s quite difficult for me to have missed the point. I’d have quoted you directly if I was talking to you. It was a general comment triggered by Awol using the word “targeted” using the traditional military definition, which not everyone here (or indeed outside these boards) does. Some people literally think Israel is going out of its way to kill civilians, and some people just use the word “targeted” to mean something different. The distinction is important given the way Hamas deliberately uses civilians as human shields.

You’re exaggerating a bit though. You claimed we’d played that way since Woodward but at the last World Cup we looked pretty dangerous in attack and even blew away the All Blacks in the semis with multiple tries. South Africa then absolutely humiliated us in the finals.

I’d agree with you except maybe Marler and Cole, for the reasons you outlined in the second paragraph. Nobody has a good time if you can’t at least compete at the scrums.

I dunno. I don’t think it’s necessarily good to clear out older players en-masse because if it means we have a couple of years of disastrous performances it’s arguably worse for young players’ development than being introduced into a winning team that performs well on the pitch. I think there needs to be recognition we need to move on from our older players, but in the form of an organised phase-out (perhaps over a year or two) rather than mass cull.

The word “targeted” means different things to different people. We all know Hamas deliberately place military targets in and among civilian targets, and use Palestinians as human shields. If Hamas has based themselves in a building full of civilians, and Israel drops a bomb on it, Israel would say they’re not targeting the civilians - Hamas are the targets and they’d be dropping the bomb whether or not the civilians are present. Their opponents would say Israel deliberately aimed the bomb at a building known to contain civilians - therefore civilians were targeted. As I’ve mentioned before I’m broadly anti-Israel but I tend to subscribe to the first viewpoint. I think it’s a more accurate use of the word. Ultimately the acceptability of a given action comes down to the proportionality, but it’s important to acknowledge that the way Hamas fight makes it impossible to fight them without causing civilian casualties and it’s not only Israel that bears the blame for that.

I honestly think the All Blacks are an easier game for England than South Africa. There’s something about the way the Boks play that England just can’t deal with, and the All Blacks just aren’t quite as good as they used to be. It’s so frustrating when you’re losing all your scrums, even your own ones. You can’t win if you lose 30+ metres of territory any time someone knocks the ball on. It’s not really something that’s easy to fix either.

Honestly I think part of the problem is that Israel itself doesn’t know what their intentions are with Gaza after the war. They’ve said quite a lot of contradictory things now. To a lesser extent, they haven’t for a long time - they’ve just been settling the land and sabotaging the two-state solution while they can get away with it and kinda hoping the Palestinian problem goes away. But no other country is going to take the Palestinians, and a one state solution risks seeing Israelis become a minority in their own country - and the only other option is just to kill every man, woman and child in Palestine (way too far even for Israel). Everything Israel does seems so maddeningly short-sighted.

For reference, we’re discussing playdough here rather than dog shit!

Thankfully not. Instead, she handed me a big chunk of it and demanded I ate my “birthday cake”

I mean they couldn’t have picked a worse place to attack if they tried. Ukraine have been fortifying Avdiivka (sp?) since 2014 so I think things are heavily tilted in their favour there. Especially given that the US gave them all the cluster munitions for their artillery a few months back. Its a concern that Ukraine are struggling to push Russia back, but I don’t think there’s much chance Ukraine are going to be pushed back either.

I guess I was talking more about the dad bod. I’ve seen him on a few book covers and he’s always looked absolutely stacked, so it was a bit surprising to see him look tubby. It’d be kinda interesting if he wasn’t at all physically strong, so if it’s intentional then I suppose it is kinda cool.

I’ve actually never seen or read anything with Thrawn in it, but I know loads of people think he’s super cool. I was a bit disappointed to see clips of him looking like a fat blue version of Data from TNG. Is that what he’s meant to be like?

We bought my daughter some playdough today. It’s a child’s toy, and it only cost £2. Watching her immediately mix all the colours together was still irrationally painful.

So is Ahsoka actually any good? I’ve already seen the two videos in the post above (well worth a watch) and generally people seem to be shitting all over it. I really enjoyed Andor and largely enjoyed season 1 of the Mandalorian (season 2 was kinda dull imo). Is there anything else among the SW TV shows I should watch?

If this did happen, where do you think Egypt comes down? Just minds their own business and stays out of it? Or do you think they might get involved in some circumstances?

Hezbollah gave the IDF a lot more of a black eye than they were expecting last time they had a proper war - but Israel also flattened enough of Lebanon that Hezbollah may not want to start another war, even if Iran want them to (Lebanon isn’t in the greatest shape right now economically). There’s two ways to look at the situation. The first is that Hezbollah is exchanging fire with Israel and causing enough trouble to look like they’re taking the fight to Israel, but they’re deliberately keeping it low key enough that it doesn’t escalate to proper war. And Israel is only too happy to oblige. The more sinister reading is that Hezbollah is just waiting for Israel to commit itself in Gaza before they attack the other side of the country. These concerns are allegedly one of the reasons why Israel hasn’t gone into Gaza yet. Clearing out Gaza is going to involve committing a LOT of troops so I’m not sure how the IDF would fare against Hezbollah if they’re fighting on two fronts. Depends on lots of variables like how depleted the Israeli munition stocks are, how much of the IDF is in Gaza, whether an uprising starts in the West Bank, whether the 150,000 rockets Hezbollah apparently has are for actually attacking Israel or just as deterrence against anyone attacking the Iranian nuclear program, etc. Makes it impossible to predict. My worry is that if there is a wider war and the US gets involved, are they then attacking Iran? If so then you’ve got to feel the US is pretty stretched between Ukraine and the Middle East. Might China decide that’s a great time to take a swing at Taiwan? It’s unlikely as a lot of bad things would need to happen in sequence for it to actually happen, but this being the spark for some kind of WW3 doesn’t seem impossible.

The fact you didn’t think my previous reply made any reference to the religious right in Israel suggests you’ve not done anywhere near enough reading on the topic to have such strong opinions about it. But go on then - tell me how Netanyahu’s legal problems are not a short term issue?