“There were Hamas tunnels under that girls’ school!!!”

Sure mate, the Zionists are just gonna go “No, we don’t want it because this territory belongs to the Iranian people!” if they ever got a chance to capture it.

After all, Israel’s track record on what they do with any territory they capture in that area is not at all “hold it when they can and then when the locals fight against the occupation call them ‘violent’, ‘terrorists’ and even ‘vermin’ as an excuse to kill them, men, women and children” so clearly only an anti-semite^TM would dare think that Israel would take over somebody else’s territory and mass murder the locals whilst putting up Israeli “settlements” there.

Don’t tell us: for your next trick you’re going to click your heels 3 times whilst saying “there’s no place like home” and be teleported from fantasy land to your kibutz in “Occupied Territory”.

Sure mate, Israel isn’t at all trying to conquer all the territory it can and there is no such thing as Greater Israel plan.

On a similar note, there’s this river-crossing piece or realestate for sale in New York which would be a wonderful investment for the likes of you.

If they ever manage to conquer it, Israel would do in Iran (a country of 90 million people) a Genocide so large that it would make the NAZI Holocaust look like a minor footnote in History.

The ultra-racist extremelly violent Jewish-supremacist modern day version of the NAZIs have only not done even worse things than the NAZIs themselves because so far they have yet to occupy enough territory inhabited by people of the ethnicities they openly call “vermin”.

They could just target any ships from or to Iranian ports or of nations which support Iran with artillery or drones.

It’s exactly because it’s so stupidly easy to attack civilian ships in a space like that whilst it’s very hard to defend against it that Iran is able to do so even whilst under attack by American and Israel, so the country on the other side could do the same thing and only target Iranian or Iran-related ships.

Two can play the “fuck the other side’s ship” game there.

By international treaty, in a maritime border were one country is in one side and a different one in another, like that, the border sits right smack in the middle, equidistant of both sides, so soverignty over that Straight is divided.

What Iran has at the moment is the power to limit what passes there, but Oman could have the exact same thing if they so chose, since Oman too could do the same thing - for exactly the same reason Oman cannot stop Iran from attacking ships there (it’s a lot harder to protect civilian ships in range of land-based artillery/drones than to attack them), Iran would not be able to stop Oman from doing exactly the same.

So if Iran tried to have actual sovereignty over the whole Straight (full control, not just the ability to stop traffic there), Oman could fuck them up by doing exactly the same thing that Iran is doing now - it’s a game that two can play.

It’s generally agreed to officially put the border (and assign sovereignty) right in the middle in a situation like that exactly because otherwise the country on the side which “lost” would start fucking things up in that channel for all users.

The only way for Iran to officially get sovereignty of the whole Straight would be to conquer and occupy the land on the other side, and I doubt Iran has the capability to do so.

That might ultimatelly be good for America and Americans, so why would Iran ever do something like that?

I mean, if America was a society with humanitarian values were what’s happenned now with Trump was an exception, it would make sense, but historically the US has been in war most of its existence, of late most of it being in the Middle East causing the deaths of millions of civilians, and very few people in the US were actually against it as a question of principle and even now most are only against it because “American money”, “American lives” or “Gas prices in America” so it’s clearly not a society of good people who normally uphold good values and is just momentarilly under the control of evil people.

The US is not a society where most people think that innocent lives are sacred, be it at home or abroad.

That’s literally the one good thing Russia has done in ages.

Not that I blame Ukraine for siding against Russia (or even Iran) on everything, including this.

As somebody outside both, the very same principle that meant that I was and means that I still am against the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, makes me be against the American and Israeli war of aggression on Iran.

If you look at the merits and demerits of the actions themselves rather than follow the hyper-reductive take of the easilly brainwashed simpleton of “bad country is bad, good country is good”, it’s perfectly possibly to support, say the US helping Ukraine against Russian agression and Russia helping Iran against American agression (both righteous actions against violent aggressors) whilst being against Russian aggression against Ukraine and American agression against Iran (both evil actions of violent aggression).

but in the meantime I am a rational person who knows that a tactical vote for an imperfect party is better than letting jackbooted thugs and pedophiles run rampant.

I’m sorry but that’s only “rational” if your analysis is very superficial.

Tactical voting is exactly what has been happening in the US for DECADES and the outcome was ever more rightwing policies, social mobility crashing from almost 90% in the 70s to just over 10% now, increased poverty and so on, and even putting aside all social and economic issues and focusing only on political strategy, with this system the Democrat Party has not once but TWICE fielded a candidate so bad that they lost to somebody like Trump.

Logically doing more of the same would yield more of the same outcome - ever more rightwing populists getting elected - and the next time a far-right POTUS is elected (a guaranteed event if desperate people keep getting created in the US by falling median real incomes and opportunities alongside a captured Press specialized in blaming foreigners for it, because both parties have neoliberal policies) that next Fascist POTUS might actually be intelligent and hence even more dangerous than Trump.

Even in a fucked-up, undemocratic, power-duopoly system like the one in America, each vote isn’t simply an A/B choice that’s closed once done - the way things work in the US a vote is a cyclic choice where parties put forward their choices for candidates and the voters say “yes” or “no”, and then some years later the same happens again, so the response of voters to the candidates fielded in one cycle informs who the parties put forward in the subsequent cycle.

In other words, if people keep rejecting a certain style of candidate fielded by a party, that party is pushed to field a different style of candidate. This how the Republicans changed over the years fielding ever more far-right and populist candidates - voters responded badly to “serious conservatives” so the party fielded more and more “anti-immigrant loudmouths”. It’s funny that Republicans have been more responsive to their electorate than Democrats.

So each vote isn’t just a choice of POTUS, it’s also a message to the parties about the suitability of the candidate they have fielded and, last I checked, in Democracy it’s the obligation of parties to responde to voters rather than the other way around.

Under this broader analysis, the Kamala vs Trump result yields two possible views:

• Millions of people were wrong in not voting for Kamala.
• A few thousand people in the Democrat Party leadership were wrong in fielding somebody with insufficient appeal to voters as their candidate.

As I see it, if one is trully not a party loyalist and genuinelly wants avoid another Trump in the future, the most logical choice is to go with #2 for three reasons:

• This is the SECOND time Trump won against the candidate chose by the Democrat Party leadership. Once might be chance, twice is not.
• Success is more likely in changing what a few thousand people (the Democrat Party leadership) do than in changing what millions of people (the voters) do, so it makes more sense in focusing on the 2nd group when approportioning blame.
• In Democracy it’s the obligation of the people who are competing to be the elected REPRESENTATIVES of the electorate to appeal to the electorate, not for the electorate to simply comply with the choices of “leaders”. The US isn’t supposed to be like Russia were people are expected to not question the leader.

If one’s objective trully is to avoid having another Trump in power in the US, then logically the most effective way to do so is to push the DNC leadership to change (or replace them) since those people are VASTLY more powerful than votes and are fewer in number so change there is not only way more effective but also more likely.

Sadly, there’s a lot of people driven by party loyalism parroting “blame voters” self-serving propaganda from the DNC in order to avoid that those party leaders suffer repeatedly choosing candidates that don’t appeal to voters.

I thought the subject was about how NOT to have somebody like Trump in power, which naturally means examining EVERYTHING that led to somebody like Trump ending in power, which certainly includes looking at how and why did the other party in the power duopoly system in the US field such a horrible candidate that she lost against somebody as bad as Trump.

Of course if your “subject” is not “how best to beat/avoid a Trump president” and instead is “the electorate should be subservient to the choices of ‘my Party’s leadership’”, I can see how it would seem to you that I changed subject by not going along with the whole “the choices of the DNC are above challenge by the riff-raff” view.

Party loyals never challenge the choices of those they see as their betters - the Party leadership - and instead blame the masses for not going along with them: it’s never “how can we better make sure people want to vote for us” and always “people are horrible for not voting for us”.

Lebensraum

Actually it works best if you look at them all as ethno-Fascists (Fascists whose ideas are around ethnicity, rather than nationality like the more traditional Fascists) which is a pretty rare variant.

Obviously Zionists aren’t the National Socialist Party of The German Worker.

However they are ethno-Fascists, same as the NAZIs, hence sharing a lot of characteristics such as a race-centric discourse, extreme racist views and extreme sociopathic violence against those they see as “enemy races”, all of which explains to an extent why Zionists are so similar to NAZIs except in terms of which ethnicities they see as superior and which they see as “vermin”.

Also both ideologies were born at around the same time and were even for a while allied, though NAZIsm was defangued and mainly destroyed after WWII, whilst Zionism was given their own nation and left to spread their racism for 3 generations, which further explains the similarities between NAZIsm and Zionism (especially in terms of the style of propaganda).

This latter part also explains how Israel is a nation dominated by late 19th century white colonialism views who unironically see themselves as having “Western values”, whilst most of the West has actually significantly improved beyond such mindset since the 19th century and are nowhere as prone to things like mass murdering of civilians because of their ethnicity.

One wonders why some relentlessly insist in treating the selection of a Democrat Party presidential candidate as a fait accomplit which should not be looked at, criticized or challenged, whilst treating the Presidential vote in a completelly different way.

The idea that the choice of candidate matters not implies that who the candidates are has no influence whatsoever in who gets elected, which is not at all consistent with the observed results of US Presidential elections over the years.

Surely anybody wanting that America is better led, rather than driven above all by party loyalty, when trying to figure out what went wrong in order to avoid a repetition of it, will look at the entire process rather than treating some of the choices that led to a Trump win and those who made them as “beyond question, it is as it is” whilst at the same time treating other choices and those who made it as “entirelly to blame for the outcome”.

So, Kamala would be less incompetent than Trump (such a low barrier that literally a stone I got out of my shoe the other day is less incompetent than Trump).

Meanwhile, Bernie would have stopped support of Israel when they started Genociding in Gaza.

The difference between Kamala and Trump is an inch, the difference between Bernie and Trump is a yard.

Strangelly the “Kamala beats Trump” parrots never seem to mention the alternatives to Kamala who could have been the Democrat Party candidate and are vastly better than BOTH Kamala and Trump.

Both NAZIs and Zionists claim to represent an entire ethnicity.

Both NAZIs and Zionists claim “their” ethnicity is inherently superior to others (“ubermenschen”, “God’s chosen people”)

Both NAZIs and Zionists react to criticism of their actions by saying the critics are discriminating against the ethnicity they claim to represent (“against the Arian Race”, “anti-semitic”)

Both NAZIs and Zionists openly call those belonging to the ethnicities they see as less than human “vermin”.

Both NAZIs and Zionists mass murder those of the “vermin” ethnicity with such extreme sociopathic violence that they’ll actually directly and purposefully murder children as a standard practice.

In both NAZI Germany and Zionist Israel it is common for roving bands of members of the dominant ethnicity to attack members of the “vermin” ethnicity whilst the police turns a blind eye or even activelly participates.

Both NAZIs and Zionists openly state that they want to get rid of the “vermin” ethnicity, including both using the expression “Final solution for the [vermin ethnicity] problem” to describe their plan to do so.

And don’t get me started on how the Propaganda techniques of both are incredibly similar and how if you grab most things said by Israeli politicians, replace “Jews” with “Arians” and “Muslims/Palestinians” with “Jews” you get something indistinguishable from NAZI statements.

IMHO, the only real difference between NAZI Germany and Zionist Israel is which ethinicities they deem “ubermenschen” and which they deem “untermenschen” and the historical symbol they have chosen to represent the. This is probably why most politicians in Germany - a nation which was never fully denazified - “unwaveringly support” Israel.

There being no real pushback from the rest of the World on the present-day version of the NAZIs they will keep on doing ever more NAZI things until they’re openly running a modern equivalent of gas chambers and concentration camps (which they’re already doing covertly with Gaza and the mass murder of Palestinians there).

The behavior of Western leaders now is way more disgraceful than what Chamberlain did and personally I think that there must be a lot of Western politicians on whom Israel and the US have blackmail material, which for some will be pedophilia-related.

So yeah, Israel has been doing this for literally decades, is doing this right now and will continue to do this in the future because their leadership are ultra-racist ethno-Fascist sociopaths, over 70% their population are ultra-racist ethno-Fascist sociopaths and a lot of Western politician and Press owners are sociopaths and criminals.

Oh, and by the way, The Guardian was one of Israel’s greatest cheerleaders and Propaganda partner until recently and still is, now focusing more on whitewashing the attack on Iran rather than the Genocide in Gaza and being a bit less obvious in their pro-Israel propaganda (down from overtly doing it, now they’re mostly using Manufacturing Consent techniques like use of the passive/active depending on the side, passing statements from one side as fact whilst those of the other are listes as “claims” and so on).

This is literally a situation where Kamala would do NOTHING AT ALL towards Israel different from what Trumps is doing - i.e. not doing anything about it.

Of all the possible scenarios you could use to point out that Lesser Evil is not Greater Evil, this is the worst one since Kamala would do the same toward Israel as Trump, but be more of an hypocrite about it (like saying some bullshit about “the US does not interfere with internal Israeli affairs” whilst sending them more bombs).

It would be way better to compare the actions of a possible non-Evil candidate that the Democracts should have fielded (but did not because the party is under the control of evil sociopaths) with those of Trump.

“What would Bernie have done?” sounds like a much better question to suggest here as the contrast with Trump would be huge.

Of course, pointing out that there are several Democrats who would act way differently from Trump or Kamala in this would bring up the point that a party which sidelined non-evil candidates in order to field a “as evil as possible but just shy of the other party’s” Presidential candidate needs to change and that would be questioning the perfection of he tribe and the quality of its chiefs, a step too far for a tribalist party faithful parroting “those who didn’t vote for Kamala ‘voted’ for Trump” DNC propaganda …

Well, you see, I trust the view of a Turkish person (whilst this being the Internet were everybody can “be” whatever they want, I’m chosing to trust you on being what you say you are).

What I don’t trust is an American “press trust classifier” set-up by some random person, with obscure connections and which already has a long track record of profound political bias.

Being the one which decides which Press can be “trusted” and which cannot is a perfect place for a Propaganda op (if you think the Press is a great place for Propaganda, imagine how great a “Worldwide Press trust authority” is) to shape opinion in this era of open access to information in the Internet and which specifically targets newspapers when Social Media is by far the biggest playground for modern Propaganda, and this coming from a country with one of the least trusted Press environment in the World and which is known for regularly all kind of interestes doing this kind of shit (not just the apparatus of the state setting up “opinion shaping ops” but also ultra-rich setting up “think tanks” to push “studies” endorsing policies that favor them), just adds to the suspicion that this isn’t just some pure soul who is trully worried about the evils of misinformation on the Internet.

That this specific forum - were people often get “moderated” as “anti-semites” for criticizing Israel - in this specific Lemmy server - were when I was a member of it and after heavilly criticizing Israel due to its actions in Palestine, I got an e-mail in the address I had used to register as a user of that server and which only server administrators could get from a group in Israel inviting me to a “learn about Israel” online conference - has endorsed this, further adds to my mistrust of this “worldwide press trust authority”.

The relentless push for this “press trust authority” here has a deep stink of “opinion shaping”.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the “most moral army in the World” fully showing their “Western values”.

Using the guy in a basement who thinks the New York Times is leftwing as an authoritative source for the bias of news sources isn’t the trump card you think it id.

A coin flip would be less biased than an American-based media “trust” checker op which reliably tags everything shotrt of Fascism as leftwing.