Petrol posted:

cars posted:

would one of the mods please re-sticky this thread

For some reason the moderation around here has really gone to shit. It's like a farce of a disaster if absolutely nobody was at the wheel. I am now accepting paypal to begin my independent review of analyzing the possible causes of this severe drop in moderator effectiveness.

tpaine posted:

i know i seen dogville o_o

my ex got really mad when i turned it off during the third rape scene and maybe i should have realized that was an issue but whelp thats being a stupid 20-something for you

tpaine posted:

wasn't the whole movie a rape scene, i can't remember

?? I haven't seen past the part where they are driving around santa monica bombing in to empty swimming pools, it felt pretty upbeat until then..

BREAKING: Saudi Arabia orders its citizens out of Lebanon 'immediately'

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 9, 2017

kinch posted:

oh it was already posted in the yemen thread lol

Yeah. That whole area is one big area.

mediumpig posted:

UN Watch, which is as far as I can tell a Zionist propaganda group

it is yeah... it's odd to me to spell this out, but that's because i'm so old that it's also odd to me that the earlier media facade maintained by Tel Aviv has been dropped so completely in recent years... the United Nations image war is something that goes back decades because the General Assembly passed (and still passes) resolutions against murder and oppression of Palestinians constantly with massive numbers of delegates voting for them, and the Security Council is there in large part of course to protect Western client states from any sort of real impact of global outrage.

A lot of countries' delegates and their governments have probably felt safe voting for those resolutions because of the guarantee that they'll be toothless and they'd never face retaliation from the U.S. over the vote, though probably a majority of those delegates would vote that way regardless, because among other things it's a solid way for governments doing nothing to help Palestine to get good headlines in news sources their supporters read, and one thing that's worthwhile to remember is that every country's government, of every sort, needs to muster support from at least certain large and influential sectors of the country's population to survive. The U.S. client states in the Arab world, for instance, depend heavily on maintaining a dual image among certain people in their countries as both Western-friendly champions of development and as under-siege defenders of Palestine against Israel.

Regardless, those UN votes, the worldwide news coverage of them and the ridiculous numbers of countries registering repeated condemnation of Tel Aviv's policy had been some of the worst optics over those previous decades for the Knesset's leading political parties, which up until recently spent tons of cash and hours every year maintaining the image of the government as torn, conflicted, humanitarian, merciful, etc. in their oppression of Palestine. So one of the places you saw dovetailing between pro-occupation fanatics, Bircher paranoiacs and "cut spending" business conservatives in the U.S. was over combating the at least mildly bad press of these United Nations resolutions passing year after year, with a whole miniature industry within the Zionist lobby springing up around it.

Over the last decade though since Kadima rose and fell (a centrist compromise party built on the legacy of the rape of Lebanon) it's been a major flip of the script to this faux butch who gives a fuck image in the news from the government, with Netanyahu dropping even the thin veil of pretense toward human-rights concerns he'd assumed in earlier times and often neglecting even to use the long-standing conventions of such language, and of course that only encourages more atrocities, though it's not like they were scarce even back when Labor was in power either.

Now most of the "humanitarian" propaganda coups come out of occasional cherry picking or toothless court decisions, and the propaganda is mostly directed inward at the legally recognized/favored population of the occupying country through Haaretz and similar venues, even as opinion polls show that the angling away from the humanitarian language has a ton of support among those voters. It makes stuff like UN Watch seem almost quaint, though the money hasn't dried up.