Fair, but the point is that there is no side here playing by the no civilians rule, yet only Palestinians are called out for it.
The headline of the newest chapter in this shitshow for some reason is “How could Hamas attack Civilians?! Civilians?!” When the reality is that hasn’t really been a red line to the Israeli government or Hamas. Never has been.
Its evil all day, don’t get me wrong. The twisted thing is that somehow Israel is somehow perpetually marketed as being the good guys playing by the rules of engagement in spite of being no different with regards to killing non-enemy combatants.
Why are israeli civilian concert goers a global tragedy, while Palestinian civilian casualties past and present just another thursday? Why doesn’t the world lose its shit at 10 Palestinian civilians killed a month? Are Palestinians somehow universally recognized as having less value as human beings than Israelis?
“Amongst Israelis, 69% of those killed were civilians and 31% members of the IDF. The number of Israeli civilians killed, from attacks by Palestinian armed groups or individuals, has declined steadily, peaking in 2002 at an average of 22 deaths per month, and dropping markedly to an average of one civilian per month in 2007. 6/
In contrast to Israeli figures, however, Palestinian civilian fatalities have remained high. Palestinian civilians, killed by Israeli security forces, peaked with an average of 35 deaths per month in 2002, and again in 2004. In 2007 they dropped slightly to an average of ten civilian deaths per month.”
Both sides kill civilians with abandon, and Israel is markedly better at it. Major media doesn’t seem to care very much about Palestinian civilians though.
My big ex left me for a rich guy customer she met at work selling high end watches, who dumped her a couple years later. She’s now fat and alone at 40.
Her once traumatic “you know this hurts me too” parting line puts a smile on my face now. Sometimes following your exes is fun.
Reminder, prior to the 1980s, America largely had an entirely different and actually equitable business model, even in large corporations: Customers first, employees second, investors third. This makes sense because if customers and employees are unhappy, the business will fail. It was well understood that happy customers + happy employees = investors make money and are happy too.
Then the greed class, led by people like John Francis Welch, apt last name, and sold by mascots like Ronald Reagan, waged and won the class war handily by convincing the laborers it would be unseemly to engage in class war while they were economically slaughtered. Unchecked greed went from being acknowledged as the vile personal failing and personality deficit it is to being America’s core cultural value, one we’ve been exporting globally ever since to my shame by association. The George Baileys appealing to basic humanity were snuffed out, and we now all live in Pottersville on Pottersearth. (These are It’s a Wonderful Life references, for the uninitiated)
Now business priorities are defined by truly sociopathic capital markets, and the global business model is now investors first, investors second, investors third, and fuck you your position was outsourced to an 8 year old slave child in Bangladesh so I can pocket an extra dollar lol.
That’s why you’re miserable as an employee, and why you can’t get service worth dogshit as a customer. Blame the capitalists who decided to cannibalize their own societies and planet for short-term profit. The ones that were already making a lot more and living larger than their employees, but demanded to live like modern Pharoahs on humanity’s back.
Because it’s worth you subsisting in fear and uncertainty, unable to afford to actually live a decent life, to travel to places and have experiences, so that the big mega yacht an oligarch commissioned can have a slightly smaller support mega yacht to tug it around and go where the big mega yacht is too big to fit. Priorities, duh!
You make a hardware store with knowledgable, helpful, well paid staff, ethically sourced quality products, and sell hammers for $20 because that’s what your buying power at your scale allows you to turn a reasonable, sustainable profit on.
Walmart pays overseas slavers to make 10,000 hammers at $1 each and they sell them at the new Walmart that just moved in for $7. Customers need to find it themselves because the employees correctly don’t give a shit as they’re paid shit.
Sadly, us peasants have proven, given the opportunity and out of necessity, we will support Walmart and their $7 slave labor made, slave labor sold shit hammer, before supporting a local business with ethical business practices selling a $20 hammer, even at higher quality.
Oh and after Walmart has put main street out of business with $7 hammers, they’ll raise that price to $18 and pocket the difference, as was the plan.
Integrity costs more to deliver than exploitation, and the less you have the less you can afford to support integrity in business. That’s why most of America’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, that degradation started far before Amazon and internet shopping started doing to Walmart what Walmart did to honorable entrepreneurs.
Americans sure do love a “great deal.” over time though, those great deals cost us all more than we could imagine. We never considered the inevitable outcome of those great deals we got by dealing with amoral, exploitative businesses. We were so short sighted that we just assumed that those amoral businesses willing to hurt anyone from employees to suppliers still had the customer’s best interests at heart. We thought we were in on the hustle with those $7 hammers, when we were just another mark.
I’ll just assume your family is penniless, sent you to poorly funded K-12 schools, and kicked you out on your ass onto the street the day you turned 18 with no warning or support of any kind, and you still somehow got a degree without debt.
Otherwise, you’d be a raging hippocrite born on third base crowing like you hit a triple! Clearly though that can’t be the case.
I’m sorry your family did you like that though, that’s rough.
I know it’s supposed to be his gimmick, but that asshole truly deserves to have his bell rung by someone in a kitchen staff somewhere for making that his gimmick.
Same for Bobby Flay who literally has a show where he’ll go into some southern kitchen and tell some lady from a family generationally famous for chicken and waffles that he can make it better than her.
Sure it’s staged, but even wanting to look like you’re doing it in a non-overtly fictional, actor playing a part way makes you an asshole. Why do people appreciate assholes? I don’t get it.
I could handle anger and fear, it’s the insatiable greed and cartoonishly blind worship of the greedy that makes me find this place intolerable and beyond hope. Our country literally celebrates inequality. We aren’t a society, we’re a handful of winners manipulating a couple hundred million losers into beating each other to death over scraps and false promises for further private profit.
Most of our hatred and fear flows out of the intentional division that having greed as our core cultural value stokes. Jealousy, schadenfreude, sociopathy, anymous, division, distrust, on and on. All in the name of people who already have embarrassing levels of wealth acquiring more. always more.
It’s like watching someone who weighs 700 pounds scooter his 20th plate from a private buffet to his table, surrounded by malnourished onlookers who wish they were him and dream of being so morbidly obese that they too require a scooter to ambulate. It’s disgusting on every side, it’s painful to watch, it’s absurd, and yet it’s what is considered rational here.
Then a health inspector should cite them or shut them down.
Culturally, how is it healthy to have some rich, well known chef come in and scream at anyone about anything until they start crying to thunderous audience applause? Full frontal nudity should be considered less offensive.
Cruelty, yay? I’m glad we have rage monsters solving problems by screaming at people?
People buy the product by tuning in, but the product is the appearance of reveling in an asshole being an asshole to people who already have shit on their plate to deal with.
God, “reality” Tv revels in cruelty. Hey let’s watch that show with the mentally ill guy who has a hoarding compulsion, and probably agreed to to make his private shame public out of economic desparation, to feel superior to someone!