[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[Sashi]

Israel's iron dome missiles have started.... misfiring? A few of them have done corkscrews and then slammed into the ground in Israel and some have hit targets in Gaza.

If this really is misfiring and not some other weird thing it's extremely bad news for any hope of a ceasefire. Israel's leadership believes their safety is dependent on a cultivated aura of invincibility and they probably won't be willing to back down if they lose trust in their iron dome security blanket.

[PseudoStupidity]

Thanks to the war in Ukraine we know that modern militaries will sometimes use missiles that are designed for airborne targets to instead target things on the ground, and that this can result in missiles doing dumb things. I wouldn't be shocked if Israel was using some Iron Dome rockets to bombard Gaza for some fucking reason, and that they would work about as well as described. Also, rockets meant to intercept stuff sometimes do weird things on their own because they've got easily fooled computers onboard, and the Iron Dome rockets probably have even shittier computers than an S-400 or Patriot battery as they're meant to intercept homemade, short-range rockets that don't do evasive maneuvers to dodge interceptors. Iron Dome is kind of meant to be crappy, so I imagine using it for purposes other than the one it was designed for makes it even crappier. If that's the case, that is. Maybe Hamas has figured something out to trick Iron Dome missiles or the Iron Dome missiles have some sort of connectivity that lets you fuck with them in the air by using electronics (but that tends to require a big vehicle full of sensitive equipment, so I doubt it's that).

[Omegonthesane]

The current leadership of the occupation of Palestine would never agree to any ceasefire without international pressure (or rather, the removal of active international support).

If anything I see the failure of Iron Dome as something of a positive for medium term hopes of a ceasefire. By allowing the occupiers to attack Palestine without reasonable fear of Hamas' bottle rockets, the Dome reduced their incentive to agree to peace - to any peace. Why avoid retaliation by ceasing their aggression, when they can avoid retaliation through the unilateral use of fancy tools?

[MGuy]

I'm not sure that Netanyahu or the IDF will cave to anything less than the threat of America dropping Israel as a client state. They've shown no consideration for those that were kidnapped, they have shown no concern about how costly just sending tanks in has been so far, and do not seem worried about future blowback from this even as they threaten to spark aregional conflict. I have my doubts that a misfiring defender system is going to shake them.

Maybe the people inside Israel may come to remove their leadership but I don't know how likely that is right now.

[Stahlseele]

Wolf Blitzer is a big name among American journalists.

That is such a hardcore name.
Would make for an awesome shlocky character or villain . .

[Sashi]

If anything I see the failure of Iron Dome as something of a positive for medium term hopes of a ceasefire. By allowing the occupiers to attack Palestine without reasonable fear of Hamas' bottle rockets, the Dome reduced their incentive to agree to peace - to any peace. Why avoid retaliation by ceasing their aggression, when they can avoid retaliation through the unilateral use of fancy tools?

I see what you're saying, but I'm just far more pessimistic about the situation. Current events show just how much asymmetric retaliation they're willing to resort to when attacked. I just see them taking a "you kill one of us, we kill a thousand of you" stance before they back off to avoid retaliation.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Deliberately provoking retaliation to use as a pretext for ethnic cleansing in the name of "its just disproportionate revenge! WHICH IS OUR RIGHT!" has been an explicit public stated strategy used by Zionists and stated in public by Zionists for longer than I have been alive.

[Stahlseele]

Deliberately provoking retaliation to use as a pretext for ethnic cleansing in the name of "its just disproportionate revenge! WHICH IS OUR RIGHT!" has been an explicit public stated strategy used by Zionists and stated in public by Zionists for longer than I have been alive.

"Seit 5:45 Uhr wird jetzt zurückgeschossen"

[Kaelik]

https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003 ... l-students

The people with the monument to an SS division are going to explain to you why communism is bad.

[PseudoStupidity]

They're not even going to teach about the wide-ranging famine, just the Ukrainian part of it! That's so fucked, both because it's bad history (imagine thinking only Ukrainians starved) and because it's red scare anticommunist propaganda.

And this coming hot off the heels of giving a standing ovation to a former SS officer. I hope this is just the dying fascists popping off instead of an actual movement towards even more blatant fascism in the US and Canada, but the rising tide of fascism in the "west" has been moving pretty quick as we gear up for war against everyone who doesn't bend the knee to the US.

[Kaelik]

This is actually part of an extremely OLD form of pro fascism in Canada which is actually the same reason they standing ovationed a Waffen SS dude.

See after World War II there was this thing called Operation Paperclip where the United States pulled a bunch of German Nazi scientists into the US to do research. But Canada, as three mining companies in a trench coat instead of a real country, did BABY Paperclip. Instead of pulling German Nazi Scientists, they pulled literally every random Ukranian SS member they could get their hands on to come over and be Pinkertons. You have to remember, most Ukranians who fought in the war fought for the Red Army, but obviously, if they fought for the Red Army, they had no reason to leave, but if a Ukranian DID fight for the nazis, then they had a LOT of reason to leave.

So Canada pulled over every Ukranian SS member they could for the purpose of turning them into Pinkertons and thugs to break up strikes. Since Canada already had a not insignificant population of Ukranian workers, they were very useful in turning all the Ukranian communities into pro nazi, pro fascism, anti union, pro canadian capitalist communities. (Which is of course just four ways of saying the same thing.)

Which is why there are three different monuments to Ukranian Nazis specifically in Canada and at least one of which (and maybe all three) was built and is maintained by public money. Which is why there were so many Ukranian Nazis that one of them was stupid enough to answer "did you fight against the Russians in World War II" and why that answer wasn't seen as condemning as it is by the Canadaian Speaker?. Why is why they have a whole "Holodomor" rememberance movement flush with mining company cash to bribe the Education Minister of Ontario, because their communities are controlled by a bunch of Nazi descended Ukranians who see doing Cold War Nazi Apologia as a righteous crusade. Which is why a Canadian Minister for the Liberal Party is descended from a Ukranian Nazi propagandist during World War II and regularly goes around touting that fact as a POSITIVE when it comes to Ukranian relations and her ability to speak for Ukranians.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Here in Australia we imported Nazis who also were not scientists and our reason was ...? Maybe to try and prolong the White Australia migration project? Anyway we got among others a bunch of mid level Nazi politicians. They immediately went into conservative politics and are highly influential to this day. Tony Abbot former prime minister who tried to make the Queen knight her own husband and ate a raw onion on TV like he doesn't know how to human was one of their personally hand picked prodigies.

[PseudoStupidity]

The IDF shot 3 hostages who were holding a white flag, they said they thought they were Hamas but that is obviously a poor reason to shoot 3 people under a white flag. Not that we needed more evidence of it, but Israel doesn't care about the hostages. Or the rules of war. Or Palestinian people. Or seemingly anything other than ethnically cleansing Gaza.

[MGuy]

IDF assaulted a church. Christians inside attacked and killed with no warning. More and more people are starting to understand that they are being absolutely indiscriminate in their assault. The US is the only major holdout for the increasing demands by the UN for a ceasefire.

[Kaelik]

The IDF shot 3 hostages who were holding a white flag, they said they thought they were Hamas but that is obviously a poor reason to shoot 3 people under a white flag. Not that we needed more evidence of it, but Israel doesn't care about the hostages. Or the rules of war. Or Palestinian people. Or seemingly anything other than ethnically cleansing Gaza.

Also, this event is one we KNOW about. But the IDF's own report is "first we had the sniper shoot two of them, then one escape into a building, then when we assaulted the building he was shouting help me in Hebrew. Then we shot him. Then we looked at the corpses and one of them looked western so we tried to identify them and they were hostages."

So right off, we know that if you surrender and beg for help in Hebrew, but don't look white, you get fucking shot and no one even bothers to identify your corpse.

Secondly, "we can tell our guys apart from their guys because our guys look like the come from Western Europe" is extremely fucking telling about how Israel thinks about it's place as a settler colonialist nation of white europeans occupying the middle east, even if they lie about if when you ask anjd pretend to be a "Jewish" state.

[Kaelik]

Israel killed 40% more people per day after the pause then before to make up for lost time.

They are now openly saying the always obvious fact that they are doing this to ethnically cleanse palestinians not because of any imaginary hunt for Hamas that the US media and politicians pretend is at play.

The biden admin continues to arm them and say it supports them 100% in their ethnic cleansing.

But by far the weirdest fucked up shit is that while the US has an aircraft carrier fleet parked off the coast threatening to kill any country that "attacks" Israel to stop a genocide. So Israel has just been taking advantage of our kindness by regularly blowing up churches in Lebanon and attacking Syria. Because never let it be said that Israel won't kill every single civilian they can get within range of their bombs.

[Kaelik]

Edit: Correction: Tony Blair's spokeperson is saying he does not have anything to do with the lobbying for countries to take relocated Palestinians.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If you look closely it will probably turn out he was actually working on planning a new roll out of a universal ID card for the UK. The man is like a terminator but for creep state universal ID card roll outs that never come to pass.

[Thaluikhain]

Add just came up on my FB (the Coalition isn't currently in power, this is intended as a vote grabber):

"A Coalition Government would provide $8.5 million for Australia's Holocaust museums to commemorate the October 7 attacks."

[PseudoStupidity]

Why would you put Oct 7th attack stuff in a Holocaust museum? Aren't those totally different and unrelated events?

[Kaelik]

One might wonder what the response would be if the arguments deemed good enough to justify the attack on Gaza were inverted. Suppose national newspapers were to argue that because the government of Israel has ordered hideous atrocities, as it certainly has, Israeli officials should be killed at any cost, and if Tel Aviv must be destroyed to achieve this then so be it. If the bars of Rehavia must be turned into rubble, too bad – besides, look how close they are to the presidency on HaNasi Street. Has the Israeli state ‘diverted funds’ to the building of underground bunkers for its leadership? Is carpet bombing justified on grounds that the government and the political parties that constitute it are ‘integrated into Israeli society’? Arguments as absurd as these acquire respectability in the service of killing Palestinians.

I recommend the entire article: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03 ... -from-bone

Why would you put Oct 7th attack stuff in a Holocaust museum? Aren't those totally different and unrelated events?

The answer is quite obviously because they want as little of the holocaust museum as possible devoted to condeming genocide and as much as possible dedicated to promoting genocide.

[Omegonthesane]

this is also sort of US news, but it's internationally applicable so I'm dumping it here (also it's not *that* new, the article was January, but basically the literal actual data says that triangulation is a good way to alienate what I'm going to call the "soft left" and "left liberals" without gaining any "soft right" or "right liberal" votes as the latter would rather vote for Pepsi over Diet Pepsi.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

The Politian in Australian federal politics who is always the most obvious a beetroot faced drunk who is probably drunk right now and rather obviously attended parliament shit faced on a regular basis.

A guy who I remind you was LEADER OF A MAJOR PARTY... WHILE IN COALITION GOVERNMENT... FOR YEARS... WHILE OBVIOUSLY DRUNK... and who many in his is party WANT BACK AS LEADER AGAIN. The man who filmed a red faced obviously drunk rant as his come back from the wilderness of still being an MP just not taking interviews for a month or two after his affair was revealed to the public (don't worry, the media knowingly sat on it for a decisive election as that was only polite, what exploit a sensational story involving his daughters parading down small town mainstreets announcing it with megaphones during the election campaign? Does Murdock LOOK like he needs more money?) and ranted about "Just wanting politics to stay out of his life". He also complained about media butting into his life with his new mistress who was an underling from his office IN AN EXCLUSIVE PAID MEDIA INTERVIEW... in which he was slightly less drunk looking actually.

That guy has now been filmed shit faced drunk lying on his back on the side walk mumbling about "dead fucking [EDITED]" on his phone.

Seriously this is the guy that people wanted a breathalyzer and maybe a drug test at the parliament doors for.

MORALITY VOTERS are one of his two primary constituencies. The other one is people who vote for anyone who can fake a drawl and wear a cowboy hat everywhere when totally inappropriate for your fucking government desk job. And he DOES fake the drawl, well, the country drawl not the drunkard drawl, he's a posh boys school type by background. But still fucking two faced so called Christian fucking morality voters. MORE of a plague on our nation than the hat based demographic. Though perhaps not by much.

The OTHER major Hat constituency MP we have is at least not a drunkard. Still a stark lunatic with a personal vendetta against the highly endangered Australia Lungfish. Also his hat is bigger.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

So that drunk guy being caught out obviously being drunk has finally allowed the mainstream to ask other members of parliament "hey... are you drunk?".

Our first example is of course... the deputy leader of the party which that drunk guy from the last post used to lead.

And she says, yeah, I had a few wines before senate estimates. If I was slurring my speech its a medical condition I have secretly had for 2 years. I don't know if I was sober enough I could legally drive. Go ahead breathalyze me at parliament I DON'T MIND.

I can't stress how much breathalyzing parliament is GOING to come up with results if it ever happens. Australia has a drinking problem, it extends to our federal government MPs. We are a nation of dumb drunk yobs led by dumb drunk yobs.

edit: Oh and update on the drunk guy himself and the lying on his back making threatening swears into his phone. He now admits it was a "mistake"... to mix alcohol and prescription drugs... and we are what supposed to be like "well oops I guess its fine then"... FFS.

[MGuy]

Is the sobriety of the parliament now something that the voting public is now going to have to think about during elections going forward or is this relegated to just bring another quirky thing elected officials do?