A quarter of a billion well spent /S
Holy shit it was that expensive? Some defense contractor got a new yacht, I’m sure
Years ago I attended a friend’s sister’s wedding who was marrying the son of a defense contractor from Houston in Vegas. This motherfucker rented out multiple conference rooms at Paris for the ceremony and reception, open bar and meal for hundreds of people, rented two-story penthouse suites at MGM for the wedding party and flew all the family out to be there. He had to have blown hundreds of thousands on this ceremony that was over in half a day. That’s where a majority of our taxes go, to rich parasites like this. Think of every problem that the federal government just throws money at and you’ll find people like this. This is why we pay so much yet little ever gets accomplished. We’re all too busy squabbling with each other while they fleece us.
They have played us for absolute fools
It was always a literal boondoggle.
It existed to give the illusion if doing something to help, it was the equivalent to burning the aid money slowly while starving children watched.
Fuck Biden for doing shit like this and then insisting if he’s not president it has to be trump.
If it’s not Biden, it’ll be Trump. That’s the reality we’re facing
That’s the reality they’ve given us.
It’s okay, I have it on good authority that after Trump loses the next election that all the dem voters will say that the threat is gone now and will push for the drastic changes needed to stop situations where the choice is between a senile old right wing capital and a senile old far-right wing capitalist.
Or at least that’s what they’ve all been promising, that after this one last Trump time that everyone can finally be critical and demand better. Surely there won’t be another far-right threat to force all leftists to vote for a right winger, and we all know centrists will never vote left, it’s only the left that must change direction.
This hits so close to home as you perfectly captured exactly what I’ve had people tell me here and on reddit three presidential elections in a row. I get that people have short memories, but how do they keep falling for these same lines over and over again while everything burns down around us?
You’re not wrong, also you must consider it’s because of all the people who don’t vote. They would have no clue about any of the choices you are talking about because they didn’t have to make the choice. Can’t forget something you never knew.
I was a super volunteer for both Bernie campaigns and everything that I ever looked at or heard regarding strategy, voting districts, and simple math, all said that the way to win on election is to get just a handful of those non-voters out to the polls, and then our ideas win handedly. I can’t remember the figures, but that second time around we had a million people sign up to volunteer and figured that if all of those people could get three traditional non-voters to the polls and vote for Bernie, we would have handedly won the early primaries, which was the priority that we had literally four years to organize and plan for. We didn’t realize we would win in Iowa but the media was going to declare former CIA asset Pete Buttegieg the winner anyway.
People have a lot of theories about what what stopped Bernie from winning and most of them are at least partly true, because we were up against everything. I remember feeling like every project or team I worked on or with was continually running into walls, mostly media walls, where our messages got spun and flipped against us. And I remember that last run, coming in hot to the primaries with massive fundraising, in February and March, before the other contenders dropped out and backed Biden, and I don’t know wtf Cornell West is up to right now, but at that moment in Bernie’s campaign he said something that has stuck with me: “RFK was shot in June.”
Man, that’s what people who are engaged in the process are up against; most of America has literally no clue about any of this happening. They live their life day to day, a quarter mile at a time, paycheck to paycheck, with zero time for politics, policy, law, and government. The engaged, undecided voter is like a unicorn, I’ve never seen one, and I’m pretty sure they’re only myth. And that’s my rant, thanks for sticking around. See you at the dinner buffet.
Well there is a wide range of experiences and perspectives.
For me personally, while theres a bunch of awful stuff going on, its not like those things didnt exist before. We have been dealing with nationalistic terrorism for at the very least since the end of the Vietnamese War.
I hate to sound all silver lining or whatever, but the reason I’m not worried is that over time, in general, it seems the majority slowly moves forward as fast as they can comfortably do so.
Objectively bad things like violent crime, unequal rights, tribalism, religion to an extent, have all declined consistently over my whole life.
And I will add that the republicans who are saying that their way of life is under attack, it absolutely is. I dont know why people expect these groups to just hear a well argued position and just decide to change their mind.
Its very rare for people to change against their local community without a strong driving factor, and a loud democrat is never going to be that.
And for the record, I dont care about Biden’s problems right now because even he is changing as fast as possible given his own biases and past experiences, and the fact that the democrats lead as a party leads me to being comfortable with the VP taking over if he dies or goes senile.
In fact I’d much rather a senile Biden to any version of Trump. Ive also yet to hear anyone say that the next election cycle is going to be more of the same since. I hear about optimism for our next possible choices.
Jeez. I’m glad I’m not the only one for whom there was something about the above poster that prompted a long-winded response.
I always say, reality leans left. Like, how long do these dummy-o’s think they are going to deny climate change before they die in a flood? How long will they deny vaccine efficacy before they die of measles? They’re going to bend left or reality will snap them off like a reed in the canebrake.¹ I just don’t know where they think they’re going by themselves.
- Epic of Gilgamesh: “Yes: the gods took Enkidu’s life. But man’s life is short, at any moment it can be snapped, like a reed in a canebrake. The handsome young man, the lovely young woman—in their prime, death comes and drags them away. Though no one has seen death’s face or heard death’s voice, suddenly, savagely, death destroys us, all of us, old or young. And yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers divide their inheritance, conflicts occur—as though this human life lasted forever. The river rises, flows over its banks and carries us all away, like mayflies floating downstream: they stare at the sun, then all at once there is nothing." That’s where we’re all going, like bugs.
Pointing fingers doesn’t get you out of a trolley problem.
This is such a frustrating response when someone has been warning not to let the drunk conductor drive the train since long before we ever reached these two sets of tracks. Now we’re on them, and the response from some is “Well he got us this far. Might as well let him finish the journey” when it now appears that one set of tracks is a dead end and the other sends us plummeting off a cliff.
Reiterating how it sucks and you saw it coming also won’t change that this is the situation.
This is real.
That’s why it’s a trolley problem.
No, but it does wake people up to the reality of what is and will continue to happen every election unless we collectively do something about it.
What does gloating and exclaiming “haha, you’re stuck in this situation we’ve caused!” accomplish exactly?
If you let your spouse handle your finances and they keep spending all your bill money on blackjack and hookers, the appropriate response from them isn’t “well the money is already spent. You bringing it up isn’t going to help anything!” when you see the shutoff notices from the water and power companies and confront them about it.
gloating
Who the fuck are you talking to?
Do you think the word “problem” is positive?
Yes, I thought it was clear that was what I was complaining about
Fuck Biden for doing shit like this and then insisting if he’s not president it has to be trump
It takes a special kind of evil to blatantly facilitate a genocide because you know if you’re held accountable even worse shit gets done.
They’re both pieces of shit.
Yeah well vote for Trump and you’ll see what a genocide actually looks like.
I always said that the aid pier was entirely performative, but that’s even more pathetic than I was expecting
What gets me every time they talk about this pier… The ships in the photos are amphibians landing ships designed with ramps and flat bottoms so they can unload on the beach without a pier. The pier is totally unnecessary in this scenario
The pier was necessary for Israeli ops tho
How so?
To rescue the 4 hostages in return for almost 300 dead Palestinians and magnitudes more of wounded people.
This right here is the correct answer.
I don’t think it’s credible to say that The pier was built for the Israeli rescue operations.
In fact, without the pier they still would have executed the operation. Pier was convenient, but not necessary
In fact, without the pier they still would have executed the operation. Pier was convenient, but not necessary
There’s absolutely no way they’d have allowed it’s construction of it wasn’t necessary for them. We can tell because it’s already being dismantled
The amphibious ships are small and can’t carry a lot. The proposed idea made a lot of sense in that it would allow larger ships to be used so less trips and less fuel per ton of aid, but the political will was just never there to keep it running or make sure it was planned thoroughly enough.
Absolutely shameful, but on the plus side military logistics students just got another case study.
Yeah, but then you’re on a beach, so you need vehicles that can drive on a beach, possibly in wet sand, possibly still half in the water. Unless you’re actually doing amphibious assault in enemy territory building a pier is a good idea as it makes unloading vehicles/cargo much easier and broadens the type of boats you can use for transport.
100% agreed. If they had been serious about this whole we’re going to bring supplies in from the sea. Day 1 through 30 should have been amphibious vehicles. Day 30 through 60 should have been pier-based vehicles, and 60 plus should be showing massive high throughput. With UN peacekeepers at some point to prevent bombing of the aid caravans.
UN peacekeepers lol.
Those are the little boats that take things from the pier to the shore. The boats that take things over the ocean to the pier are not landing vessels. They are large ships and only have a cargo ramp, which requires a pier to unload. I looked at hundreds of pictures before writing this and didn’t see one large ship with beach landing capabilities. The largest landing ship I saw was the USAV Matamoros, Runnymede-class ship with a capacity of 20 stacked containers, with no ability to load them onto trucks. It needs a pier to load trucks. Could maybe carry eight trucks already loaded, which is nothing. It operates regionally, not transoceanic.
Wasn’t it just a cover for that rescue mission?
“Rescue mission”? You mean that one where they disguised US / Israeli military as humanitarian aid to get into a refugee camp to slaughter 274 innocent people?
I get your point but it is disingenuous to ignore the fact that it was a rescue mission.
Not that anything I say makes one god damn bit of difference, but I TOLD YOU SO
What don’t the Palestinians simply die so all the Israelis can build nice homes on the beach already? So selfish.
The pier did not deliver aid equal to a single day of land aid. Most of the aid was left to rot because israel did not allow it in. Israel also kept bombing the warehouse with the aid.
The pier was used to disguise an israeli military operatation as an aid truck and colonize the land. Israel has since built a giant military base near the pier they claim would be used for aid.
Israel kept bombing their own military operation?
Just like they kill their own who have been taken hostage.
The UN workers distributing the aid brought in from the pier were bombed by israel. And also the warehouse used to store said aid was bombed by israel.
Though At the start of the Genocide IDF casualties were at least 20% friendly fire so your statement is also correct. They just fire at anything that moves.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A US military pier, built two months ago as a way to bring sea-borne humanitarian aid into Gaza, is to be permanently dismantled within a few days, according to a new report.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the pier, which has had to be moved repeatedly to avoid bad weather, would be reconnected to the Gaza coastline on Wednesday but would operate for just the next few days before being disassembled by the US army and navy.
The pier scheme, first unveiled by Joe Biden in his State of the Union address in March, was always intended to be a temporary measure to complement the meagre amount of aid being allowed across land crossings by Israel, but US officials told Reuters in June it would last until August or September.
The eastern Mediterranean off the Gaza coast had been choppier in the summer months than had been expected with stormy weather making it necessary to move the pier in and out of position repeatedly.
Apart from a day’s operations to clear the backlog of humanitarian assistance on the beach, the WFP has continued to suspend its convoys pending a full security review.
Over its two months in operation, about 8,800 metric tons of aid has been unloaded off the pier, about 500 truckloads, equivalent to a single day of deliveries before the war began.
The original article contains 495 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Isreal borders gaza on two sides. Why would they need to land troops?
Yeah, I misremembered the extraction operation where they took out hostages using the pier: https://apnews.com/article/pier-humanitarian-aid-gaza-israel-un-2465291ca9308f9d97e3cc51a8cab6c7
And as a result I may have been uncharitable in my assessment.
Why is any of this necessary? Israeli state would like Palestinians to not exist. US state couldn’t be tied more closely. Nothing about the various exploits there are what were being asked to believe, IMO.
That’s weird, you say they want Palestinians to not exist but Israel is letting in tons of food and medicine every day, more and more, building desalinization plants, and sending millions and millions of phone calls and texts to warn and evacuate people, and have not killed 99.2% of the Palestinian population.
You can’t believe that, but for anyone else who might come across this:
- Israel are using starvation as a weapon, which is a war crime https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza
- Israel warn Palestinians to evacuate to another location, only to bomb them to pieces there. Eg. Rafah.
I can’t believe what, thee verifiable facts I’ve pointed our which fly in the face of your emotional theories?
A fundraising solicitation is not a credible source of informatipn. Your second point is a half truth and basically an urban legend that’s been repeated about 1,000 times. The IDF has at no point guaranteed anyone’s safety or deemed any place 100% safe. They give general instructions to avoid areas where bombing will be heavy, such as where a several miles of tunnel needs to be blown up, and the overriding instruction is always “don’t hang out near Hamas members or tunnels.” 0.8% of Palestinians just couldn’t quit the terrorists though, and of course some actual innocents get caught up in the chaos. Maybe don’t elect terrorists to be in charge because they do shit like start wars they can’t possibly win based on ideological insanity.
Wrong again, in so many ways. As I’m sure you know well, the Israeli military designates humanitarian areas or “safe zones” for civilians. But you’re not arguing in good faith at all so I’ll leave you there.
No, at no point does the IDF underwrite the safety of these areas. You have misunderstood what you heard and read. They say these areas are more safe, but with the overriding warning not to go near Hamas members or tunnels.
