Some of these replies seem to think it is okay to hit a random guy, walking passed, in the knee with batons. Escalation of force starts with clear and concise commands. I didn’t see one of those uniformed men command or inform those two that they weren’t allowed to do whatever it is they were doing (appeared to be walking casually on the street) before they busted out the batons.
That still would've been wrong. Imagine if I came in to your house and decided half of it was mine. The half I like btw. And then slowly start taking more until you're locked in the basement and can't leave until I say so.
I download all of the videos like this so that in 30 years when free speech is illegal and you have to scan your id embedded in your brain chip to access the internet i can show them to the future generation before my brain gets fried for wrong think.
Archive.org may be soon loosing a copyright lawsuit that will put them out of business. Better not rely on one third party for something this important.
One of the biggest failings of society is when we, instead of holding them accountable, give the bullies bigger sticks and look away until it's "not a problem" anymore.
Biden is older than Israel, he was 6 when it was created, and he has said he will always support them no matter what because when he was a child his father made him promise to.
Elderly people often don't realize how much has changed. In Biden's eyes Israel will always be the victims because of WW2.
For him to accept that was generations ago and lots has changed, he'd have to come to terms with how old he is.
And if he could do that, he wouldn't be trying to increase his record for oldest president ever.
It's a normal thing our brains do if we're lucky enough to live that long.
Humans didn't evolve to live in such fast pace worlds. So if someone made it to 60, running on "autopilot" wasn't as big of a deal. So as we lose critical thinking skills (again, completely normal) we fall back on stuff we learned as kids and stereotypes to be able to keep up.
It's why not having an age limit on elected representives is so crazy.
It's outright denial of science to pretend an 80 year old is still capable of leading a country. For more reasons than just that one.
I don't think this applies to all 80 year olds though. Some of the smartest, most open-minded people I've met have been 70+ year old university professors. These are the kind of people who retired, and then came back to teach because they were bored. It's definitely possible for humans to retain their critical thinking well into that late stage of life, but I'll grant you that most who make it to that age don't seem to manage it.
I can only hope that if and when I reach that many decades on this planet, I'll still have the kind of clarity of mind to not get stuck on 'autopilot'...
Let's not just blame it on someone being old. They know exactly what's going on they simply don't care about a bunch of poor people dying when these are in between their ambitions.
I doubt the reason "why" the west is supporting a genocide is a promise the current ceo of usa made as a child, especially given that the same policy has been going on for a century. I also doubt it has much to do with them being old since again the same war policies have been applied for a century.
True. As an outsider to US politics, it painfully obvious to me that the only difference between DEM and GOP is rhetoric, but when it comes to action, they all do the same thing.
EU politics is no different. It doesn't matter what the people want, "democratically elected leaders" will do what they want, or rather what they are told to do, regardless of what the people think.
Aside from one party trying to make being trans illegal, or trying to make pollution legal, or trying to cheat at elections, or ignoring global warming, or make abortion illegal, or crushing unions, or trying to defund Ukraine, or trying to teach creationism....
Do the Democrats have policy and action problems? Absolutely. Are they the same as the Republicans? Of course not.
Both red and blue parties are ruled by corrupted criminals with blood on their hands and that's enough not to want to vote for any of them.
Human rights have never been a US government priority, look at the war crimes they committed around the world and how they are supporting a genocide right now or look at their support for evil corporations and how little they care about poor people.
USA army is one of the biggest polluter in the world and the government has 0 plans to shut it down. The government has always been linked and tied to polluting companies.
The government has always cheat at elections, see how much money they spend on propaganda, mass surveillance and how they have a tight grip on media.
Ukrainian government is an authoritarian regime now seeking to repatriate these who fleed the country to force them to fight.
When Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet during his visit to Israel, the U.S. president assured them: "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist."
My guess would be kompromat. Nothing else is convincingly able to explain Biden's willingness to crash our democracy into the rocks in defense of the far-right Israeli government.
Why? Well the TL;DR is that it's very fucking complicated.
Israel is a useful military proxy for the US. They probably do a lot of advantageous things for us. (the US isn't just the tooth fairy after all) i've heard on the grape vine that we have existing established weapons deals with israel that could very iffy to overturn (as per usual with this shit)
zionist as a term is also very broad. It can be used to mean quite a lot, though specifically with islam, it seems to be a pretty generic term of "we want our own state" and that's about it.
hamas is funded/supplied by iran (unless this has changed?), last i checked we bombed the ever living shit out of iran in the war on terror, so they probably don't like us, and we probably don't like them, so as far as the US is concerned, this is just a proxy war on iran with israel buying our military equipment. We've seen iran strike israel, and israel strike iran, so this is basically just a proxy war at this point.
strategically, from a military perspective, there is probably a "good" reason to be doing this, good as in the sense of keeping your military power healthy. This is technically a way of the US testing equipment in war time, though who knows how much of that is true. military hardware investigation is a fucking nightmare so i might just be pulling that one out of my ass honestly. There are almost certainly other benefits, like the aforementioned proxy war, it allows us to keep an eye on how war tends to work in the middle east, which gives us a technological leg up, because we can prepare for that.
the israel/palestine conflict itself goes back quite far, and continues into even murkier waters. If you look into some of the history it's pretty fucked up. And incredibly hodge podge. This shit has never been clean, will never be clean, and can never be clean. This is just an unfortunate fact of long term disputes.
israel has kind of pushed palestine into a hard space over the years. Palestine has reacted by creating a hard space to push israel into, which israel is obviously pushing back on. And now we have warfare in an urban setting.
This shit sucks, it's awful, there's almost no way to have a set opinion on anything except for the fact that "it's bad"
oh and need i mention we're in between what is essentially two marginally different accounts of history through religion? To my knowledge, israel, and palestine refer to the same plot of land (at least roughly) in a historical sense (religious texts lmao, but probably even outside of them) so now we have two parties, who are basically the same party, fighting over what is basically the name of a place, but actually because israel decided they don't like palestine? (probably, i dont know why they did this shit, could be a multitude of reasons) now it's essentially escalated into what can only be described as a war.
now to be clear here, i'm not supporting any one party here. I'm just pointing out a handful of complex reasons as to why this might be the case. I hate when people take incredibly complex geopolitical conflicts and rivalries and go "well actually bad dumb and good smart"