At about 9 pm on Thursday night, the IDF began assembling ground forces along the border with the Gaza Strip, after having said earlier in the day that a ground offensive was on the table:
Yes, the IDF had deployed troops along the border but they did not cross into Gaza. What did happen was in the air where 160 aircraft had assembled for a massive bombing run over the Gaza Strip. Their target was what the IDF called Hamas’s “Metro”, an underground network of tunnels where Hamas stored its weapons and used to move throughout Gaza hidden from Israeli aircraft.
The “Metro” had been built in the years after the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, also known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge. It was a network of dozens of kilometers of tunnels that crisscrossed Gaza and provided safety from Israeli aerial incursions.
According to reports, due to the deployment along the border and the news coming out in the foreign media of a ground incursion, Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent their first-line of defense into the tunnels to start taking up positions. These were the anti-tank missile teams and mortar squads meant to strike at incoming Israeli ground forces.
What these Hamas operatives did not know was that there was no ground offensive. Instead, once they were out of the tunnels, they were exposed to Israeli aircraft. Within minutes, the “Metro” attack went ahead.
Crafty.
This account makes absolutely no sense:
“According to reports, due to the deployment along the border and the news coming out in the foreign media of a ground incursion, Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent their first-line of defense into the tunnels to start taking up positions. These were the anti-tank missile teams and mortar squads meant to strike at incoming Israeli ground forces.
What these Hamas operatives did not know was that there was no ground offensive. Instead, once they were out of the tunnels, they were exposed to Israeli aircraft. Within minutes, the “Metro” attack went ahead. This led to speculation that the tweet about the ground incursion was intentional and made to get Hamas to believe it was safe to enter the tunnels.”
Deliberate misinformation? Or dumb reporters whose Ivy League credentialing left them with no understanding of anything? I know which way to vote!
Little bit of “Column “A”" and a little bit of “Column “B”"?
The thing that makes no sense here is that the Israelis have given away the game by making it clear they know where the tunnel exits are. Why would you do that, if you’re going to invade? Makes no damn sense, whatsoever. On the other hand, who knows? Wheels within wheels within wheels.
If it were me, I’d be making sure that every single dead Hamas leader was tied with a corresponding “traitor” within Hamas, let that be “discovered”, and then watch as the internecine slaughter commences. With a proper intel plan, you could easily double or treble your kill ratio.
This is one of the things I just don’t get about the way the West and the Israelis wage war. There’s zero actual use made of the superstition and fear endemic to the Islamic world–I mean, these are people who were convinced that every one of our soldiers in Iraq had air-conditioned body armor and x-ray glasses on at all the checkpoints, and the literal amount of disbelief and disappointment they had when some of the translators found out we weren’t able to share such wonders with them because they didn’t exist…? Yikes. I don’t know which was worse, for them–Understanding that it wasn’t that we had all this super-gear, and that it was sheer discipline keeping the guys in their gear at all times, or that they realized that that was why they were so f**ked up, that they believed all those fairy tales. One of our ‘terps nearly had a nervous breakdown from the cognitive dissonance–On the one hand, he’d “come over” to us, thinking we were superhuman with all these techno-toys, and on the other, he was actually frightened because our guys would do what they were supposed to do when they were told to do it. He had no reference point for that–His service in the Iraqi Army was based on the idea that only what the commander witnessed and punished for not doing got done, and the idea that there were people who’d do that sort of stuff, day in and day out, without someone standing there with a gun to their heads…? Paradigm-shattering.
Our intel plans should have been taking advantage of this stuff from day one. I’d have released everyone from Guantanamo with strong hints that they were implanted with tracking devices and bugs, and then let them all go nuts trying to find them. I’d also make damn sure that there were drone strikes associated with those released prisoners such that everyone turned them into pariahs. The idiots we have running most of our intel operations are credulous morons that think everyone in the world thinks the way a graduate of Harvard or Yale would, and have no idea how to wage effective war outside of their narrowly-constrained world-views.
“Evil leader! I respectfully request we extend our giant tunnel network into a net of ‘spider-holes’ not visible from the air-“
BAM!
“Surviving minions! We are the baddies! We have a duty to be outfoxed by the goodies and easily killed from the air!”
Ground radar is real. Maybe the IDF spotted heat off the bodies of soldiers still covered by ten feet of dirt and rock. Maybe the Jerusalem Post article is on to something. But I’d say it is like most official statements, not quite right factually.
I think this referenced article is entirely off-base about what actually happened. Not only is the language bad, but the sequence of events is not what I’m finding elsewhere.
Best understanding I can eke out, right now, is that the Israelis put out a deception plan that convinced the Hamas leadership that a ground attack was imminent. Hamas then manned the defenses and got ready to strike the incoming Israeli troops, only the Israelis knew where all the tunnels and exits were at, and then attacked with a devastating aerial attack that precisely targeted the tunnels and exits.
Assuming that they did this right, that probably means that a significant number of Hamas troops and leadership cadre are now dead and buried in their tunnels. And, ohbytheway, that the Israelis have turned the international media into a weapon of mass distraction in their conflict with Hamas.
Ah, well… They’re eventually going to manage to kill off all the troublemakers, or they’re gonna breed a superterrorist through natural selection. My guess is that what with the Arab predilection for inbreeding, what’s going to happen is that they’re eventually going to have culled all the troublemakers from the gene pool. Natural selection, and all that…
I’m really not too impressed with the Arabs I’ve met, especially the Islamic ones. Cousin marriage is a bad, bad idea, and the people that come out of those societies are pretty much dolts incapable of committing acts of critical thought. Which, when you look at the religion they invented, is sorta easy to understand. “Inshallah” works really well, when you don’t want to go to the trouble of thinking or being honest with yourself about your failures.
Kirk, what I’ve read is that a significant number of Hamas regulars are dead, while their Guards or elite units are squirreled away in deep, safe bunkers. Suppose things calm down after this. Suppose there’s some question about what happened to the money Biden freed up for the PLO?
The Guards units are intact. Any accurate rockets Hamas had before this, they still have hidden. Palestinian leadership can still effectively repress dissent.
Regulars are chewed up. Joe average Pal has fired his rockets. The average Palestinian is much less able to force an audit of Biden’s cash. If this was Hamas leadership’s goal, their war was a success.
I don’t think Arabs are bad soldiers. I think military juntas need to keep their best units safe to keep in power.
Bruce: “…a significant number of Hamas regulars are dead, while their Guards or elite units are squirreled away in deep, safe bunkers.”
No! That can’t be! US Pravda regularly informs us that all Palestinians are peace-loving innocent people who would not hurt a fly. The Palestinians are so peace-loving that the Egyptians had to build a wall between Egypt and the Palestinian territories to prevent their fellow-Arab Pali peaceniks from misleading Egyptian citizens. Not that US Pravda would ever point that out.
If it is true that Hamas’s elite units avoided the death & destruction visited upon regular Joes and civilian Palestinians, Hamas would have to watch out for unintended consequences. It would be reasonable for ordinary Palestinians to turn against what they might reasonably see as cowardly elite units who created a problem and then abandoned them to their fate.
Actually, Arabs are horrible soldiers. Great bandits, great terrorists, shitty disciplined soldiers. There’s a reason the Iranians have been kicking their asses for literally thousands of years. The Islamic conquest of both the Eastern Roman Empire and Zoroastrian Persia came at the tail end of a plague, or they’d have never gotten out of the Arabian peninsula. Most of their early “conquests” consisted of moving in on regions that had been depopulated and which were virtually wastelands. It’s an interesting speculation to try to work out what would have happened with Islam had that phenomenon confronted an Eastern Roman Empire and a Persia that were not already on their knees due to the plague. I’m unsure that there would even have been an “Islam”, given the lack of real documentation from the supposed lifetime of one Mohammed “the Prophet”. I think there’s a lot of ambiguity there, and I suspect that there may be good reason the Saudis have razed much of the historical and supposed “Holy Cities” of Mecca and Medina–The actual archaeological record likely doesn’t support the narrative of the Koran, which wasn’t actually written down until centuries after the fact. So, destroy it all, and then there’s nothing to show that there’s no underlaying support.
The interesting thing to me about Islam is just how much of a “religion for depravity” it really is–Alone of all major faiths, it actually has written instructions to the faithful that it’s perfectly OK to lie, cheat, and steal in the name of it. Which, when you consider that the good Muslim considers Satan the “father of lies”, makes you wonder who our supposed prophet was really listening to, in that cave…
Most “good Muslims” can’t make that connection though, and if you point it out to them, they’ll usually wind up sticking fingers in their ears and ullulating, rather than answer the question.
Final analysis boils down to this: Arabs of the Islamic persuasion are generally fabulists and fantasists that can not operate under conditions wherein they evaluate the world around them objectively and rationally; they’d rather see that which they believe than that which is real. It really is a perfect faith for Democrats, when you get down to it–Reality is what they say it is, rather than what it is. Which plays merry hell when it comes to making war, as opposed to razzia. They’re great at raids, shitty at stand-up fights. Anything that requires objective evaluations of reality and/or consistent responses? Not going to happen–Daily discipline required, like aircraft maintenance or vehicle maintenance? Not from an Arab force; the officers don’t want their men to know things, and hoard the knowledge as if it were the only thing they had going, because knowledge is power in that situation. However, those same knowledge-hoarding officers are too lazy to actually do any of the work themselves, work being something for women only from their childhoods.
The whole culture is unrepairable; in order to fix it, you’d have to go in and root out all the little cultural habits and syndromes, and by then, what’s the point? You may as well commit genocide, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to “fix” the issues.
Mark my words: Within two generations of the oil running out, and the Arabs having to fend for themselves, the entire peninsula is going to revert to sheer primitive tribalism as was there before the oil. You’ll have a mercantile periphery, as in the days of pearl fisheries, but that’s about it. Anything requiring hard, steady work? That is inherently “not Arab”, and will not happen. Take away the oil money, and you take away the expats. Expats leave, and that whole region goes under the sand again. Only way to prevent that would be to exterminate the Arabs, and utterly replace the population with people that don’t practice cousin-marriage and who have a real work-ethic about things. There will never, ever be an Islamic Martin Luther or a Calvinist version of Islam, in that nobody of that faith is ever going to take personal responsibility for their actions. It’s designed to remove human accountability and responsibility from its adherents, thus the whole “Inshallah” thing. It’s all God’s fault, one way or another, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
Which is why they’re so shitty at making war or building much of anything.
Kinda like Democrats, TBH.
“The whole culture is unrepairable; in order to fix it, you’d have to go in and root out all the little cultural habits and syndromes, and by then, what’s the point? ”
Edward Luttwak essentially said this about Afghanistan, when asked by the Bush II Admin about the prospects for “building democracy”. He was ignored, of course…
We are really going to have to reconcile ourselves to a “tough love” approach with these dysfunctional primitivist cultures. You can’t force them to adapt, or “set an example” absent them actually doing what an addict or alcoholic does when they hit bottom and realize that they themselves need to correct or modify their behaviors. You can’t “fix” from the outside; you have to do that from the inside.
Perfect example of this? Contrast Japan and China dealing with the West and modern conditions. The Chinese utterly refused to recognize that they’d fallen behind the despised “barbarians”, and they got what they got. Japan, on the other hand? Japan figured it out, had the self-honesty to acknowledge their issues, and then forthrightly set about adapting themselves, taking what they chose to take from the “modern” West.
Which result was preferable?
Likewise, you’re not gonna “fix” Afghanistan or most of Islam from the outside. They have to hit bottom, and recognize that they need to do it themselves, and they’ll have to either do it or fail at it enough to cause that reaction.
We could help it along, but that’d take us being willing to do what Japan and the West eventually did to China, and utterly rape the place until the locals recognized “Hey, we are f-ed up and behind the times… We really need to catch up…”.
That’d be “tough love”, and I don’t think the West is up for that, these days. The Chinese, though? LOL… I can’t wait to watch the fireworks once they grab onto all that mineral wealth under Afghanistan, and then implement the Uyghur Solution on the locals. Either it’ll be China’s 21st Century Vietnam, or the Pashtun will have met their match in sheer vicious brutality. I’ll be over here, playing the world’s smallest violin as the whole of the Hindu Kush goes up in flames… It’ll truly be a case of “Why can’t they both lose…?”.
“…a significant number of Hamas regulars are dead, while their Guards or elite units are squirreled away in deep, safe bunkers…”
I’m not sure that’s true. I read, could be wrong, that the water table around Gaza is high so they are limited in how deep the tunnels can go. I assume you can counter this by drilling ahead of where you are going to tunnel and pressure grout(cement) into the ground but I don’t think they have the resources for that.
I doubt we’re ever going to really know, TBH. It’s a lot easier to lie about who died than to acknowledge that you got a bunch of people killed through being an easily duped dumbass. I have no doubt but that there will be an awful lot of “little lost Hamas troops” who were “sent off to training in Iran”, akin to how parents will tell their kids that little Spot is out living at Grand-Uncle Bob’s farm, out in the country, happily frolicking across the fields with the sheep and goats… Rather than run the hell over because little Timmy left the door open and he got out.
Hell, I’d lay money that there will probably be job openings for people to fake up messages from Abu Buried, the Hamas operative who’s in Iran. Reality? Abu is ten meters under, somewhere along the border.
What we have here is a failure to learn, and a general inability to recognize reality. By this point, any sensible Western culture would have come to terms with the facts on the ground, and either cut traces and headed elsewhere, or learned to live with things. Not the Palestinians, though–They’re in complete denial of reality.
I’m gonna guess that the end-game for all this is going to boil down to Israel winding up as the ally of all the other regional Arab powers, like Saudia Arabia and the Gulf Arabs, who will then abandon the Palestinian cause completely–All the more likely, since the idiot Palestinians have chosen to side with Iran. Sooooo… Long-term? Look for Arabs in Gaza getting hammered by both Israeli and other Arabs. You may even see the Israelis whistling and looking the other way, whilst Arabs kill Arabs, and the Israelis kill Persians…
After all, the Israelis are as Semitic as the Arabs, while the Persians are Aryan interlopers. The Palestinians are in the process of turning themselves into what other Arabs are going to see as “race-traitors”, and I don’t think that’s a good place to be.
Y’all want a foretaste of how it’ll go? Look at what happened to all the Palestinian expats in Kuwait got treated after they sided with Saddam in ’90. Took about six months after we drove the Iraqis back into Iraq, but exactly NONE of those people were in Kuwait or any other Gulf Arab country in the aftermath–And, they’re mostly blacklisted to this day, everywhere. Long-ass memories, there in the Gulf. When I was there in the early 2000′s, the Kuwaitis were kinda admiring of the Israelis, but completely down on the “…traitor Palestinians…”.
I honestly don’t think the calculations they’re making are gonna work out the way they think they are. At all.
How about we just leave them alone? Some far-away foreigners have a lifestyle that we don’t respect. So what? What is this megalomaniacal drive to turn the entire world into Wisconsin? It makes a lot of bureaucrats feel powerful as they play Risk with real people and real maps, and it makes a lot of money for a few well-connected arms companies, but is it good for anything else at all? Hell, we can barely control Wisconsin these days, but we think we’re going to mold the Earth into our image?
Sam J.,
You could be right about the water table, but sump pumps are available. A pot grower told me he grew homegrown under pans of water to defeat airborne surveillance. Maybe Palestinian tunnellers try something similar. And of course it’s easier to shovel wet clay or mud.
If it’s true that there’s a ceasefire with 227 Palestinian and 12 Israeli dead, my guess isn’t proved wrong: Hamas elite strengthened, normal Palestinians weaker and less able to check what the elite does with money. An attack that makes the Iron Dome look good might annoy the Israeli military-industrial complex less than they sound.
Contaminated NEET,
I see your point, and even agree with it.
The issue is, you simply cannot, in terms of today’s modern technology, share that technology with these unreconstructed 7th Century mindsets.
Were you to posit simply saying “Yeah, no modern technology for you, unless you also take the rest of the package…”, it would be one thing, and that thing probably workable.
However, huge ‘effing comma… Should you not block that technology transfer at the same time, you will wind up with a situation wherein you’re putting recombinant DNA technology and things like CRISPR into the hands of those self-same 7th Century atavists, who will then use that technology to cobble up all sorts of things you can’t afford to let them screw around with. Consider the likely long-term effect of a world where some budding bin Laden can go down to the local high school whose Western benefactors have thoughtlessly equipped with a CRISPR lab or other suchlike paraphenalia of modern genetic research, and he decides to cobble himself up some nice modified mousepox that’ll take out all those nasty, nasty infidels…?
Wonder why we don’t see any signs of intelligent life, elsewhere in the Universe? This is probably why… The “Great Filter” is probably the fact that civilizations tend to develop unevenly, and unless they’re really, really careful, the imbalanced development means that the recidivist bits of that species get the advanced tech without the advanced culture that militates against its abuse.
Hell, consider just the relatively benign features of sharing modern technology with primitive societies–The chainsaw, for example, has done more to destroy tropical biomes in the hands of primitive fuckwits who have no concern for either sustainable logging or conservancy. They have a slash-and-burn mentality coupled with the technology that enables them to destroy those rainforests, to the detriment of the entire planet.
You can’t survive a situation wherein you couple the technology of a relatively advanced society with the social mores and values of a much more primitive one. It simply does not work–You want to maintain a primitive culture? Fine… You maintain ALL of that culture, to include the lack of modern medicine, sanitation, and all the rest.
Sadly, I strongly suspect we’re going to find out that nothing else is really survivable, on a planetary scale. The day rapidly approaches where one idiot in a lab somewhere can unleash death on us all, and when that time is here, everyone in those labs had better be on-board with the values and mores of modern society, or we are all going to die in unpleasant ways.
Kirk,
I see what you’re saying, but has anything the US or other Western countries have done actually helped bring society and culture in places like Afghanistan into line with our norms? It all looks monstrously counterproductive to me. Your proposed solution has just made them hate us. And I don’t blame them.
My proposed solution? LOL… I ain’t proposing shit, just pointing out a very clear cause-and-effect linkage that nobody wants to acknowledge or talk about.
I think 99.99% of Gene Roddenberry’s ouevre was utter tripe and bullshit, but I do think he got one thing right with his Star Trek non-interference thing: You can’t (and, as the inevitable corollary shouldn’t…) interfere with a culture or civilization’s development. Intervention and trying to “uplift” in most cases is going to be an utter disaster, as witness everything that went wrong with the whole “Native American” and “First Nations” efforts here in North America. Stone-age primitivism next door to a relatively advanced culture is a recipe for disaster on both sides, and one of them is going to wind up destroyed, one way or another. Best not to try, and if you do, then be merciful and utterly destroy the failing one in mind, body, and spirit. Anything else? You can tolerate it, to a point, but once that losing culture/civilization has access to WMD through your good offices and stupidity, wellllll… They’re likely going to use them.
Look at Japan for an example. Sure, they industrialized and adopted a bunch of Western “stuff”, but what did they do with it? Same-same as they’d always done with their neighbors; they couldn’t think of anything else. And, if they’d have had the full panoply of nuclear weapons, what, do you suppose, they’d have done with them? Good Christ, the horror story that was Unit 731 makes it pretty clear that we’d have been well within our rights to leave the entire archipelago depopulated. We’re just fortunate that we were able to reform as much as we have, but who knows how long that’ll stick?
It’s still surreal as hell to realize that what was taken as a modern, civilized nation-state in the early 20th Century was conducting vivisection, germ warfare experiments, and cannibalism on their enemies during the 1940s. Which makes one wonder whether what Perry did was really that wise, absent doing what MacArthur did in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Kirk says, “The issue is, you simply cannot, in terms of today’s modern technology, share that technology with these unreconstructed 7th Century mindsets.
‘Were you to posit simply saying ‘Yeah, no modern technology for you, unless you also take the rest of the package,’ it would be one thing, and that thing probably workable.”
Kirk is brilliant. He’s opened my eyes. Our problem is sharing technology with the Jews’ unreconstructed 1,500 BC mindsets.
Except for the fact, you fucking twat, that those “Jews” invented nine-tenths of it…
The backwards jackasses in that case would be YOU.
“’Jews’ invented nine-tenths of it.”
Not even remotely close to being true and most of the things Jews say they invented they just stole from Whites and through their propaganda machine tell everyone they invented it.
I don’t see why you are sore. I only use the same judgement that you use for the Palestinians.
While I don’t love the Palestinians no Palestinian ever blew my buildings up like the Jews did in NYC on 9-11.
No Palestinians ever spent decades changing laws through bribery and blackmail to mass import aliens into Western countries.
No Palestinians ever bought up all the productive business with created out of thin air FEDbucks, flooded it with debt and moved all the manufacturing offshore.
No Palestinians ever flooded the schools in the West with hate speech against Whites.
No Palestinians ever sold off all the military technology to Russia when they were the USSR and now China.
I could go on, for a really long time, but you get the idea.
From my perspective the Palestinians are really nice people in perspective.
Stop sharing technology with the Jews unreconstructed 1,500 BC mindsets would be great help Without printing they could not flood the market with FEDbucks they use to take over all our businesses and run their illegal stock shorting schemes.
Sam,
What are “Whites”? Are Irish “White”? How about Italians?
The history of Africa is “Black” people killing each other, enslaving each other, selling each other. There is no “Black” unity in Africa — nor anywhere else.
And we can say the same things about so-called “White” people. Look at how the English treated the Irish. Look at the Germans & the French spending centuries killing each other and raping the women who were left. Look at those peace-living Swedes invading mainland Europe. And “White” on “White” hatred gets even more fine-grained than that — talk to a “White” English Yorkshireman about his opinion of “White” English Londoners.
There is no unity among what those who would divide us call “White” people. Don’t fall for their game. There are good people and bad people everywhere — except in Washington DC where there are no good people.
Gavin: “What are ‘Whites’? Are Irish ‘White’? How about Italians?”
This tired old line? You’re pathetic. “Whites,” at least in America, are the people who don’t benefit from “affirmative action” in education or hiring, who don’t qualify for “minority” business loans, who don’t get preferential treatment in government contract awards, and whom it is socially acceptable to insult on a racial level. It’s always so murky and confusing to you liars who counts as “white” until it’s time to award a scholarship, make a hiring decision, or hand down a disparate impact verdict, then somehow it’s crystal clear. So, to answer your question, yes, Irish and Italians are white. Obviously.
Contaminated NEET said, “It’s always so murky and confusing to you liars who counts as ‘white’ until it’s time to award a scholarship, make a hiring decision, or hand down a disparate impact verdict, then somehow it’s crystal clear.”
Exactly. I’ll have to save this it’s about as good an explanation as you can get. They also use the same line when they say, “Just who are the Jews?” Another stupid method to befuddle people, but the answer is simple. Jews are people descended from Jews.
Gavin Longmuir says, “There are good people and bad people everywhere.”
It’s all a matter of degree. If you buy a barrel of apples and 5% have worms and are bad it might be worth picking though them to separate out the bad ones, but if a barrel of apples is 40% bad, then it’s probably not worth picking through. If the barrel is 90% bad then it’s not worth picking through in any circumstances.
Contaminated NEET amusingly wrote, “‘Whites,’ at least in America, are the people who don’t benefit from ‘affirmative action’ in education or hiring, who don’t qualify for ‘minority’ business loans, etc.”
So, your claim is that Americans of Chinese and Japanese heritage are “White”?
You have fallen into the trap the Best & Brightest set for you, Contaminated. Instead of being opposed to Government-sponsored discrimination (as all thinking people should be), you are being fenced into the “Black”/”White” plantations they have set up for you.
Break free! Think for yourself!
“So, your claim is that Americans of Chinese and Japanese heritage are ‘White’?”
No Gavin, it is not. While Chinese- and Japanese-descended Americans don’t get the full basket of goodies that Blacks do, they undoubtedly get more official advantages and protections than Whites. The little snippet of mine you quoted mentioned minority business loans, and Asians certainly qualify for those, for example.
It is you Gavin, if you are White, as I suspect you are, who has “fallen into the trap.” You are foolishly determined to live as a lone wolf in a world of packs, because the “Best and Brightest” have told you ten thousand times in their movies, their TV ads, and their textbooks that seeing yourself as a member of your group is the most evil thing imaginable.
Conned wrote: “… they [US citizens of Asian heritage] undoubtedly get more official advantages and protections than Whites.”
Sounds like you have not applied to Harvard recently. :)
Conned, you may imagine yourself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with masses of your fellow “Whites” — males, females, Democrats, Communists, Republicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Zoroastrians, Greeks, Poles, Russians … even Irish. All of them ready to sacrifice their lives for you — because you are a fellow “White”.
But that is all in your imagination. A quick glance at history would show you that most of those people do not see you as a fellow “White”. Most of them feel no kinship with you at all. Many of them come pre-loaded to dislike you intensely, because you are a New Yorker or an Oklahoman or a non-Christian or a vegetarian or whatever.
“White” and “Black” are plantations prepared for you by your real enemy who are manipulating you by the time-honored technique of Divide & Conquer. Think for yourself! Don’t fall for their scam!
That’s cute about Harvard, but what did I say about minority-owned business loans? Are Asians ineligible for them? Did my twisted racist mind hallucinate them? Obviously there’s a ranking of racial privileges and advantages, and Asians are not at the top, but neither are they at the bottom. Tap dance around it all you like, but it’s obvious that Asians are not white, and nor are they treated as white.
Back to your original point, though: are you genuinely confused about who is “white” and who isn’t? Why is it that I have no problem determining this, the average man on the street has no problem, and the authorities that hand down preferential treatment or official discrimination have no problem, but you’re in the dark? You supposedly can’t figure out how to classify an Irishman, but I see that he is white and correctly predict that every organization that makes racial distinctions will see him the same way. There must be some factor that I can perceive, and that every bureaucratic organization in American can perceive, but that remains mysteriously opaque to you. My model of the world manages to explain things that perplex you. You should update yours.
>you may imagine yourself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with masses of your fellow “Whites”
No. I observe that I am surrounded by masses of my fellow whites who are eager to plan a metaphorical knife between my shoulder blades to prove to themselves that they are good people, because they have been brainwashed by decades of the greatest propaganda ever produced. I see that Asians, Blacks, Mestizos, Arabs, and other racial groups don’t seem to suffer from this same problem, or at least not nearly to the same extent, and it I think it must be nice to have what they have.
Something else to ponder, Conned. You are absolutely right that the US government should not be discriminating against any citizen because of the color of his skin. But the US government does indeed discriminate against citizens of European ancestry (the ones you would call “White”).
Now ask yourself — Who voted for all those laws which discriminate against “Whites”, and especially “White Males”? Yup! The punters in Congress who cast those evil votes in favor of discrimination against “White Males” were themselves mostly “White Males”.
And ask yourself — Who enforces all those discriminatory laws and regulations? Yup! Mostly, the bureaucrats, judges, lawyers doing the dirty are “White Males” — although they are increasingly “White Females”, the stealth beneficiaries of a lot of government discrimination.
Why are the people driving discrimination against “White Males” mainly themselves “White Males”? The answer is obvious — they have power, and they intend to keep it; you do not have power, and they intend to keep you powerless.
The Political Class is distracting you with their false “White” and “Black” plantations, to make sure you stay powerless while they enrich themselves. You have more common ground with the “Black” worker than with the “White” politician.
Think for yourself, and you will be able to recognize who your real enemy is — and how much of a distraction the Political Class’s “White” and “Black” plantations are.
Gav, you’re like a propaganda oldies station. First it was the tired old, “Who’s really white anyway?” nonsense, now it’s, “The people at the top are using race to divide you.”
If the people at the top want whites to identify with our race to make us easier to “divide and conquer,” as you say, then why do their media hit the opposite message so hard? Every TV show, every movie, every newspaper, every video game teaches us that a white “racist” is the very worst thing one can be. Whites who identify at all with their race are evil, cruel, stupid, poor, fanatical, insane, losers. It’s OK, and even praiseworthy, to beat, insult, or even kill them. We’ve all know the story about white racists because they’ve repeated it to us a dozen times a day since we were toddlers. This is not how powerful people portray an idea they want to promote.
Conned,
You have correctly identified that you and your fellow citizens are being manipulated by the Powers That Be. But you have failed to understand why those with power (mostly “White Males”, like you) are painting you (but not themselves) as a dangerous enemy and discriminating against you.
You think you are standing up for your “race”. In fact, you have let yourself be manipulated into becoming a cog in their Divide & Conquer machine — all aimed at keeping themselves fat & happy. Those “White” bosses don’t care that they are making the lives of “White” underlings like you miserable.
Time to start thinking for yourself. Break out of the plantation in which those “White Male” bosses have tried to trap you.
Gav,
You keep recommending I “think for myself.” Perhaps you should try it, too. I suggest you start by considering why, if my position is a trap our rulers use to control us and yours is a bold and independent break from their power, will you never see my arguments made on television, while yours are repeated to us so often they’ve become cliches.
Conned: “… you never see my arguments made on television …”
Some of us don’t watch TV, Conned. We learned long ago that the media serve only the interests of the powerful.
Let me ask you a serious question — what is your “argument”?
It seems like you are saying that all “White” people should put aside their historic differences with each other and join together to fight against their “White” overlords? Is that it?
“Some of us don’t watch TV”
You’re dodging the question. Yes, you’re a smart, sophisticated, and enlightened person and far too good for TV; I’m very impressed. But that doesn’t change the fact that TV exists, that millions upon millions of people do watch it, and that it is an incredibly powerful propaganda tool. Why then do the powerful, sinister, shadowy forces that rule us consistently use this tool to denigrate the very narrative you claim they want us buy into?
Conned,
Now you are dodging the question! Come on, it is a simple question. You talk about your “arguments”, but you seem very reluctant to state just what those “arguments” are.
Last chance. You have a willing audience ready to attend to your “arguments” and give them a fair hearing. Maybe you will even change some minds and win some support. Make your case, or forever hold your peace.
“You talk about your arguments, but you seem very reluctant to state just what those arguments are.”
I have stated them perfectly clearly above; you’re confused because I haven’t made the strawman arguments that you keep trying to put into my mouth. You expect me to be the cartoon racist that you’ve been taught to despise by decades of propaganda, and because I haven’t read from your script, you think I’m being evasive. Still, I’ll do you more courtesy than you’ve done me and repeat them here one last time:
1) It is not confusing, or murky, or unclear who is white and who is not in a modern American context. This is demonstrated by the fact that the myriad organizations that discriminate against whites have no difficulty at all determining against whom to discriminate.
2) The people at the top of American society certainly do not encourage whites to identify with their race, either to “divide and rule” or for any other reason. This is easily demonstrated by the strong discouragement and demonization of white racial identity all throughout entertainment, education, and the press.
>You have a willing audience ready to attend to your “arguments” and give them a fair hearing.
Oh yes, your sneering scare quotes assure me of your “open” “mind” and “fair” “hearing.”
OK, Conned. Here is what I heard you say:
a) There is active government discrimination against US citizens of certain European heritages. (eg discriminate against those of Portugese heritage — “White”, but not against those of Spanish heritage — “Non-White”). No disagreement there.
b) The US Political Class (politicians, media, academia, bureaucracy) spend a lot of effort castigating those whom they deem “White” — but do not want those castigated people to think of themselves as “White” and identify with other “White” people as a group.
That point is more debatable. Some would argue that behavior on the part of the Political Class is class-driven rather than race-driven. For example, an Ivy League credential frees a person from the stigma of looking like an older Michael Jackson.
But OK, for now let’s accept your arguments. What is your plan? What do you propose to do about it?
a) No Gav, we do have a disagreement. You pretend for tactical reasons that is difficult or impossible to determine who is white and who is not, while I observe that it is done millions of times a day with very little difficulty and with remarkable consistency. Now you pretend not to know that “Hispanic” is officially a cultural, not a racial, category in order to portray all racial categorization as impossibly unwieldy and complex.
b) Obviously class is involved in the demonization of white identity. That part of the official narrative is very clear: while there are some white racists at the top and we must remain tirelessly vigilant against their evil, white racial identity is a marker of the lowest of the low, and all sensible whites should avoid it lest they be mistaken for toothless inbreds with decaying cars on their lawns and opioid addictions.
c) I have no plan of action. My only proposal is that we recognize the truth. Your two lies that I took issue with are high status, and they are comfortably in-tune with what we’ve all been taught, but I propose that you consider what I wrote in points 1) and 2) above; not what “you heard me say,” but the words I actually wrote, and think for yourself about whether they make sense.
Conned: “I have no plan of action.”
Then all you are doing is whining on the Internet, and wasting everyone’s time, including your own. Sad!
You can’t even face up to the most obvious fact — the people you rightly accuse of discriminating against “Whites” are themselves “White”. That is the truth.
Open your eyes!
“Then all you are doing is whining on the Internet, and wasting everyone’s time…”
I’m sorry, did you mistake a blog comment section for the Supreme Court? Or maybe the Goldman Sachs boardroom? The Yale admissions office? We’re not setting policy here, and you’re just as powerless to change society as I am.
“You can’t even face up to the most obvious fact — the people you rightly accuse of discriminating against ‘Whites’ are themselves ‘White’.”
How can you tell? Wasn’t “white” such a murky and nonsensical category that you couldn’t make heads or tails of it?
Gavin Longmuir says, “You can’t even face up to the most obvious fact — the people you rightly accuse of discriminating against ‘Whites’ are themselves ‘White’.”
Of course Gavin Longmuir is gas-lighting the f— out of us. A perennial genetic tic of the J–s. They can’t even help themselves. In this case he pretends Whites run the US.
Sometimes they tell the truth though.
When the GDJs Take Over America 1, 2, 3
This is the truth, except the last panel. We don’t need to nuke the country to change it. Even R. Crumb is gaslighting us, because all we need do is get rid of the J—-s and we can take care of this situation handily.