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Brian Fantana

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Everything posted by Brian Fantana

  1. I wouldn't celebrate before crossing the goal line. Israeli invasions of Lebanon have not exactly gone well in the past.
  2. Not sure what can be done, but this site is still intermittently extremely sluggish/choppy on mobile Firefox (Android). Perfectly smooth on mobile Edge. I haven't been able to pin down a specific thing that looks like it might be causing it...thought it might be Twitter embeds at first but that doesn't seem to be it.
  3. This is W Israel shit I can get behind
  4. I know, I was just unsure lol, seen people post BB articles without realizing it's satire.
  5. Uh
  6. I will, I already ordered it lol. And yeah, you're 100% right, every media outlet has an agenda. I try to do exactly that.
  7. Human beings are shades of grey. Rex consistently has, and is right now, showing a very basic human tendency to try and analyze everything in a very black and white way. Grey is too complex and too uncertain. Black and white is simpler, even if it's not a true reflection of reality. It's a very simple, yet very powerful, defense mechanism called splitting in therapeutic terms. In some ways, I'm sympathetic to his point of view. It's much easier, as a denizen of a Western country, to view Israel as an unambiguous good that must be championed and Palestinians (and by extension, the Arab world at large) as an unambiguous bad that must be destroyed. Drilling down past the surface, past what we've all been fed by Western media for our entire lives (or in Armybrat's case, a small percentage of his) uncovers a lot of uncomfortable truths about the situation in Israel, and the region in general, that paint everyone involved (including us, especially us) with many different shades of grey. At some point, it becomes far too difficult to view the conflict in such black and white terms. Most people are either content to simply lap up the mixture of truths, half-truths, deflections, and flat out bald-faced lies that Western media feeds us, and shove every actor involved into neat little black and white boxes. I try to stay as informed as I have time to in order to keep myself seeing the shades of grey rather than the black and white. I try to take as optimistic an approach as I can to the future of Israel and occupied Palestine, but it's difficult to say the least. Most people, again, choose to see only the black and white and conclude that some kind of nebulously defined total victory is necessary, hence the multiple posters in this thread that advocate for ethnic cleansing with their full chest (some without even realizing it, it seems). As if repeating the mistakes of the past is a way to a better future. I will say that I greatly appreciate @InkaUtexas's posting, yours, @bolverk and others, and @956 Worldwide though we frequently disagree. Inka in particular is extremely well read on the subject and the history of the region and I enjoy his insights every day. You yourself held a fairly black and white view of this subject nearly a year ago, albeit a more sympathetic and humane view than a lot of other people do, but you're smart/humble enough to seek out knowledge that may alter your world view when you're unsure of yourself. People like Rex purposefully avoid knowledge that may alter their world view, because it's too upsetting. I don't even necessarily fault them all that much for it, because it is a demonstrably hard thing to do. Hell, I should know, 15-20 years ago I was a dumbass central TX hillbilly, listening to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark fuckin' dumbshit Levin. Hooting and hollering when we were slaughtering a million people in Iraq based on a pure lie. I don't even like to think about all the dumb shit I believed. This is not to place myself on a pedestal above. I have plenty of faults, blind spots, and knowledge gaps. I learn shit every day reading this board. I am usually very bad at articulating my thoughts in a way that isn't frequently abrasive or otherwise difficult to digest by others. I frequently think I'm a lot more well read on a particular aspect of X subject than I am, and often have to stop and take a break to better inform myself or collect myself. I wish I had a fraction of your, or Inkas, or @SL Xpress, or any number of other posters' ability to elucidate my thoughts in any sort of consistently palatable way. Anyway, I have no idea why I wrote this post.
  8. I'm gonna fucking piss myself
  9. I mean Bibi has literally said the words out loud. He doesn't wanna know, you're not gonna get through that fat head.
  10. Wow they reversed it idk about that
  11. I'm not sure that's indisputable and it was called a TD on the field
  12. That's a fucking TD e: ope maybe not
  13. WHAT IS HAPPENING
  14. It's absolutely hilarious that he doesn't see that this is pure racism. Palestinians/Arabs can't be reasonable. They're orcs. It's in their DNA, don't you see? They're "savages". The only reason he isn't saying "sand n*****s" is he would get banned. It's the same reason he would never acknowledge or answer any questions about the IDF soldiers that raped Palestinian prisoners to death. He thinks they're less than human, straight up, and those kinds of retaliatory actions are acceptable. If you engage him on this topic in any way, you have to understand that his position is purely based on racism. That he's as dumb as a fucking hammer is just icing on the cake. This post made me laugh so hard I nearly dropped my phone. Seriously the dumbest person on Surly. The mental gymnastics are incredible. e: Sorry, I won't address Rex anymore it's just too goddamn funny to pass up sometimes.
  15. Holy fuck you are dumb.
  16. Stay safe!
  17. First, I do not deny at all the pogroms that occurred in the Arab world and antisemitic retaliations that occurred in the wake of Israel's establishment, nor the level of antisemitism present in the Arab world. It's all fucking gross. Second, I could not have possibly worded what I said in a worse way. What I meant to say is: The Western world has successfully shifted its guilt for the crimes of the Holocaust et al away from itself and a colonized Palestine is poor restitution for said crimes. Making Palestine entirely the problem of the Arab world would just be the Western world's final act of washing their hands of all that. I would say Israel agrees, considering their goals are very clearly to ethnically cleanse all of occupied Palestine and absorb it into Israel. I certainly agree that your scenario would definitely be better than that, at least.
  18. You might be right, honestly, it's just a shame that none of it will ever happen because we both know what the actual goal is. Considering that the Western world has spent the decades since WWII working very hard (and very successfully, I might add) to shift the blame for the Holocaust and the many pogroms that occurred in non-Arab nations entirely onto Palestinians and the Arab world, I certainly cannot disagree with this statement at all.
  19. Yeah you're probably right about that, and I personally wouldn't care who paid but my guess is the international community wouldn't respond positively to the scenario you're putting forward is all.
  20. I understand the point you're trying to make, but you're staking out a starting point that is simply entirely unreasonable and saying "See????? Nothing can be good enough!" when it's inevitably rejected by the international community. It's not a compelling argument and neither is the circular one you are presenting in the first sentence. If Israel cared to do what you're proposing they could have done it literally decades ago. e: But we both know the overall goal is to steal all that land and kill and/or displace anyone who holds out.
  21. I get what you're saying but I would guess that saying "lol it's all yours now" after you've already leveled a great deal of the infrastructure is not exactly going to win Israel any points in the international community. That argument you referenced with regard to Israel posing as the stable rule-follower but not really living up to that is not going to get any less persuasive. It certainly wouldn't reduce the risk of violence. It would just cause a desperate population to become even more desperate.
  22. Obviously this couldn't happen overnight, but I don't really disagree with what you're saying here. Does Israel foot the bill to rebuild all of the infrastructure they destroyed?
  23. Their goal is to take all that land for themselves, no matter how many people they have to kill or displace. that's the strategy. It's not going to change. I don't necessarily disagree with you.
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