volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@Laukidh exactly, on paper there was a ceasefire, and yet people didn't cease firing, which goes to show exactly what I'm talking about, how impossible it is.

It's just not a realistic option. It was tried over and over again and here we are, it doesn't work, it's not a viable option.

@Laukidh No not at all!

I'm not blaming the dead Hamas negotiator for anything. He just wasn't relevant anyway. He doesn't have blame because he couldn't have stopped it no matter what. He did not have the ability to stop those outside of his chain of command.

He doesn't have blame because he never had the ability to stop it in the first place.

If you want to say Israel killed this guy for no reason, well I wouldn't go that far, but there is some element of truth to it.

@Laukidh he could.

And the rockets would continue to be fired.

Both sides are aggressors here. The problem is, one side doesn't actually have the ability to stop aggressing. It's literally not possible because of the organization, or lack thereof, of the belligerants.

@munin because people with skin in the game decided that these people offered something worth paying them for.

That's why.

@Laukidh Yeah that's my point.

With out a reliable command structure it doesn't really matter what Hamas agrees to since that never has been a way to stop the rockets.

It doesn't matter what some public official agrees to if they're not actually in charge of the situation, which we saw over and over again, is the case here.

Yeah Hamas can agree to a lot of things. That's never meant that the agreements would be worth the paper the headlines are printed on. It's just posturing at that point.

@NZedAUS I think that you are focusing on Trump and missing the larger situation: it's not about what Trump has left or what he says, it's about his supporters projecting onto him.

What he has isn't fear and racism; it never was. What he has is a significant swath of US voters who feel disconnected from the federal government and see in him a vessel to express their discontent. Plenty see him as a way to set fire to the institutions that they feel have let them down.

All Trump has left is fear and racism? No. What he has is a crowd that uses him to vent their discontent.

@Laukidh No, it can't be ended. There is literally no one who can end it. The aggressor s are too dispersed without formalized command and control structures, so the aggression will continue, the war will continue.

That's just reality on the ground.

There can be no ceasefire because there's no one to agree to a ceasefire. The rockets will continue to fire, the war will continue.

That's just the unfortunate reality. It does us no good to turn a blind eye to it.

@Linux_in_a_Bit remember that the plane full of people died because the pilots violated procedures. The human factor was key to that tragedy.

And there are parallels with this.

@GaryRLundberg Right but with stories like these I always think we need to go deeper, looking at the structural issues that make them stories in the first place.

Often enough when there's a story about potential presidential exercise of authority the problem is that he has the authority in the first place, and we should probably reconsider granting that authority to the president, no matter who the president is.

@Roddee so much of that from the Afghanistan claim through the NATO claims have been roundly debunked for years.

But more importantly, even if all of that nonsense was true, the Biden administration has been empowered to overcome it all. He's had years to implement his policies that would have easily fixed that supposed sabotage.

So the story is not true in the first place, and even if it was true it doesn't make sense to say the president was so hamstrung. It's a false story that doesn't make sense anyway.

@GaryRLundberg It's funny how people are acting like a company with $3 billion in contracts is a little powerless victim with this story.

Maybe we shouldn't be putting all the eggs in one big corporate basket in the first place? This is a symptom that things went a little off the rails, and this helps put things on a better footing?

@Hash should I say that Democrats are all Russian bots for choosing a candidate that hasn't been able to trounce Trump? I mean that's a really low bar, but the Democratic Party wasn't even able to get there.

The party members that chose Harris must all be Russian bots, huh?

Anyway do you have any actual arguments, or just name calling?

@Hash that's some nice reasoning you got there.

@strypey I'd say so much comes down to how we in the general public frame our engagement with the federal government. It's there for the grass roots to take on if we want to.

Most importantly, we just need to teach civics. So few actually know how the federal government works and so people don't realize the levers they have to change things.

This starts with emphasizing the role of Congress and our congresspeople over the president. It's sad how few people even think about their congresspeople when they're the ones who actually have power to tackle so many of these issues.

Civics!

@europesays Republicans passed FEMA funding...

@fkamiah17 the content of the article doesn't really match its headline claim.

It's not so much Blinken approved actions as ones shoved down his throat that he was left to spin in ways that the two countries would agree to.

@bronakins I don't think y'all realize how well that played with Trump's audience.

He's not afraid of 60 Minutes or fact checking. He doesn't really care. But he did enjoy using that to score political points with his base.

@aureliano

@info No, neoliberalism didn't say there was no alternative. It said there were certainly alternatives, but you won't like the result.

And now we see people going down the alternatives on the left and right ends, and they don't like the results.

No uncertainty there. Just conformation that the results would indeed be pretty negative.