Dr. Gonzo

That's not what the autopsy report says... In actual American politics news, the GOP still can't pick a speaker because of all the unity in their party. Pedo protector Jim Jordan ended his pursuit of being one of the most powerful men in America after he got less votes in the second vote than he did the first time around. Now there's a shortlist of 9 possible next speakers of the house, because there's so much unity within the party. They're totally fit to govern and aren't a massive joke trying to throw divisive stories like the George Floyd bullshit against the wall to see if it sticks in an attempt at further driving culture wars to distract from how much of a joke they are. Trump's also had 3 of his lawyers take plea deals in Georgia. But I'm sure that also has nothing to do with the right-wing's favourite culture warrior taking to twitter to try to reignite a culture war battle over paying attention to what's actually happening in American politics.

I don't live in the UK anymore, but honestly I prefer if governments don't use my homeland as a killing ground. It wasn't alright when the Russian did it, it's not going to be alright if anyone else does it. The UK has Hamas on their terror list, they know where he lives now. It's our government's job to arrest him, if that means turning him over to Israel after his arrest... fine. But Mossad shouldn't be doing any assassinations in the UK unless they're doing them in conjunction with our government.

One of the old women who they released yesterday still has her husband left behind. I think each hostage that's been released still has at least one family member still in captivity. I wouldn't be surprised if they're treading lightly with their public statements so as to not aggravate those who are still holding their loved ones. And even in treading pretty lightly, she did say that she has "gone through hell" in the ordeal. They're clearly holding onto hostages for leverage of some sort. Either as a threat to their safety when Israel begins the ground invasion or to try to use them as a chip to negotiate a ceasefire. I think they've weirdly (and badly) miscalculated how Israel would react to this attack - I think they're acting in a way that... tbh I would really expect Israel to react. They've never really been proportionate before, so I'm not really sure what Hamas was expecting. But I also think the status quo is out the window now - Israel's got little appetite for a ceasefire at the moment. I'm not quite sure why Hamas would expect Israel to treat this attack like the previous rocket launches or the Hezbollah kidnapping of IDF soldiers. I don't think Israel's going to stop until Hamas no longer has any influence. It's shit because Gaza will pay a heavy price. Israel's going to keep this bombing campaign going up until they go in, and they've said they're delaying when they go in. It's also shit for the hostages, who are hoping to not only survive captivity... but also survive the constant bombardment. The latest thing I've seen re: the IDF trying to get hostages back is they've been dropping leaflets over Gaza promising a cash reward to those who bring information about the whereabouts of hostages. I'm not sure how much good a cash reward would be in Gaza, but if Israel is able to get them out of Gaza and give them the money... that's probably quite a tempting deal for the Palestinians there. Although I'm sure Hamas would go after anyone they find cooperating with Israel. Saw this shocking bit of news today regarding a Hamas fugitive living in London now: https://www.jpost.com/international/islamic-terrorism/article-769592 - pretty disgraceful.

Only Man Utd player my grandad ever liked, RIP

Aren’t there over 100 hostages though? What about the rest of them?

Why would he have said anything to them though?

Iran's using this time of chaos to persecute the Baluchi minority in Zahedan province. They've kidnapped many people, some sources saying as many as 210. Meanwhile on their state media they're threatening for all of their proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, etc) to attack Israel on all sides.

The BBC and CBC have adopted this policy because they have to tread a careful line with other groups some call terrorists, but others don't. Hamas is the elected government of Gaza too, granted they haven't held any elections since and killed off most of their biggest political opponents - which is why Fatah has 0 power at all in Gaza. But there's also PKK, which Turkey claims is a terrorist group... but the US, UK and Canada have all worked with them in the past. Perhaps most controversially is Canada, the UK, and the EU refusing to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group while the US has. It's state media, they've got to reflect the language that the government has issued government employees to use while talking about these groups. I'd hardly call the BBC left-wing either, their political coverage of the UK seems to have them pretty firmly in bed with the Tories.

FFS can the IRI calm down. The Houthis have fired missles at a US warship. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/security-incident-involving-us-navy-destroyer-red-sea/story?id=104147141

Well that's idiotic, the US has stood by Israel for decades regardless of which party has control. I also don't really think the mainstream media is left of centre tbh. It makes no sense for anyone with actual left-wing views to support a very religious terrorist group masquerading as an oppressive government, tbh. Hamas aren't freedom fighters, they're oppressors of Israelis AND Palestinians that explicitly promote genocide in their charter. China's more left-wing than Hamas and China gets hounded by the media constantly. Iran backs Hamas in the fight and coverage of Iran in the west is basically: "these are backward people" - it's bizarre how Hamas get so much trust and credibility among the western media. I think they aren't going to begin the ground attack until they're confident that Hamas is devastated from the blockade and bombing campaign. So my assumption is the aid getting into Gaza (which, I think is a good thing - there's 2.1m people there with about 1m of them being children; it's criminal to punish a whole population that lives under oppression from their "government" tbh) slows that schedule down a bit. But they did say if there's any evidence Hamas seizes any aid, the aid will stop. Imo it's a 100% certainty that Hamas seizes the humanitarian aid, they need Gaza to have maximum suffering for their propaganda to have maximum effect. But I think that draws out the bombing campaign, which I think makes the situation for Gaza all the more bleak. Hospital beds are already scarce. The IDF, if they're smart, would use the ground invasion (and likely subsequent occupation) to demonstrate some humanity to Palestinians there. Field hospitals could be set up and that should reduce some pressure that's put on the already overburdened medical professionals of Gaza. But I do worry about what a prolonged occupation of Gaza might mean. Palestinians have already lost so much in the last 7 decades - are they going to lose further land and further sovereignty? Israel was insane to back Hamas when they first started - I can't see how their own history wouldn't have taught them that supporting Islamists wouldn't have been a massive security threat; even if the goal was to splinter PLO and Fatah. Israel needs to be doing all it can do to promote moderate voices in the Palestinian world; backing the ultra-devout was not a way to promote less aggression in the region. I also hope that for Israel this means Netanyahu's career is finally coming to a close. He should never have been anywhere near as powerful as he's been in the decades after Rabin's assassination, purely because of his role in getting the man killed for pursuing peace. And for decades he's done all he can to shit all over Rabin's legacy and move the region further from peace. I know their government won't change during this wartime, but I'm hopeful the fighting dies down in the coming months (which is probably optimistic because of the realities of urban warfare) and he finally becomes politically irrelevant.

I don't think we've gotten any clear answer to the casualties or the extent of the damage. We just know the hospital's car park was struck, many cars exploded. The images that can be verified of the aftermath of the explosion don't seem to have bodies, body parts, or even blood - so it's not really conclusive about the extent of human loss. Some of the videos that went around online that purported to be from the hospital are from a previous year when Israel struck a hospital and caused mass casualties. So it's easy to understand why Hamas was quick to make the claim. And I'm not surprised about Al Jazeera being heavily biased towards Hamas, considering Al Jazeera and Hamas are both funded by Qatar - but I am shocked at western media taking Hamas's word at face value. They're a terrorist group - terrorising Israelis and oppressing Palestinians with their rule. When it's the Kremlin, Russia is rightfully distrusted and viewed cynically by Western media. Why isn't that the same standard for Hamas? I understand the distrust of Israel public statements and the IDF, there's a history of them being misleading and openly hostile to the free press (they've got an awful track record of killing journalists reporting on their war crimes) - but why isn't Hamas held to the same standard? They've got a history of terrorism and human rights abuses. I think it is only right if both sides are given the same amount of distrust and the media takes more of an effort to present stories with more emphasis on what happened - even if that means we have to wait for more information to come. World media rushing to report on this without enough factual information to give an accurate picture enflamed tensions in the Middle East. Israel's embassy in Jordan was flocked to. The US embassy in Lebanon is evacuating non-essential staff and family of staff. We're seeing hate crimes against both Jews and Palestinians on the rise in western countries. All because the world news rushed to report Hamas's spin pissing off a lot of people. Is the IDF just working with the assumption that all the hostages are dead? I thought there would be more effort to recover hostages - it seems they are keen to sit back and keep the bombing campaign going. There's been no real update on the plan for what to do about the hostages. Last I heard about them was a Hamas spokesperson saying they have no way of knowing how many hostages are still alive or not.

I mean sure maybe it was completely packed… but the hospital is still standing and it looks like it hit the car park. So even so… the figure of hundreds dead seems all the more unbelievable now. The whole story, from the explosion, to the propaganda claims, to the way the media covered it, to the world’s slow reaction to more info coming out about it… it’s all proof that the fog of war is very real.

That hospital only has 80 beds and they claimed 500 people died when it exploded. And now we know it didn’t even explode. Dangerous game being played by Hamas & Palestine’s health authority - because now we know they’ve lied about casualties once… hard to ever trust their numbers again.

They've gone up in San Diego county in the last 6-7 months. The market changed pretty drastically here in May, sellers were selling for under asking a few months ago - that's not happening at all anymore.

I bought earlier this year when interest rates weren't as bad as they are now, but obviously not as good as they were around 2020 or 2021. It basically wiped out years of savings without paying for points and the mortgage is more than double what I was paying at my last place. I can't imagine what trying to buy the same house today would cost in terms of: the monthly payment, the downpayment, AND paying off points on the interest rate. It's mental too that houses now are going for above asking price again. There's so many people who'd otherwise want to sell their homes that are locked in at very low rates and seeing that if they move they will be paying a hell of a lot more, so there's very few houses on the market while demand just keeps growing. But if interest rates go down, house prices are meant to go up - so it's not like there's any end in sight to this problem. Seems like it's happening almost everywhere too.

I'll check it out when I get the chance!

Kind of wild that the biggest surprise from this is that the hospital wasn’t even destroyed. Nor were there 500 casualties. Kind of insane how the media sort of just rubbishes Russia’s claims in Ukraine, but was very quick to run with Hamas propaganda.

I’m pretty confident pretty much anyone still on our forum or discord could be one of the best VAR officials in the UK, if not the best.

I know you didn't mean to be rude, but are you really going to say that after video and audio evidence confirmed that the most competent person involved with that VAR decision was the "least qualified" person to make any decision about officiating a football match? I think considering that evidence, the system doesn't allow the best to go to the top. Maybe the problem is they're not paid enough and don't face consequences for serious errors enough. I get paid more than they do, but I also know that just 1 serious mistake could cost me my job - so I take the idea of what the minimal competence required to be considered good at my job very seriously. They get a decent wage and I think we should be asking more of them considering there's people with more important jobs that are paid far less than them because they're not part of a billion pound industry... but maybe the issue is they don't take it seriously enough because they know what they make in football is fucking peanuts compared to the money in the sport. And it's very, very, very hard for any of them to lose their jobs. And obviously what I do is very different to what officials do on the pitch. But if you're telling me that the talent pool in the UK is so low for officials that these are the best we've got, I absolutely disagree with you and will once again refer you to the replay operator who is not an official yet demonstrated infinitely more competence than the VAR officials. That was a guy who's not even close to a referee, he's a software engineer - yet there he was, demonstrating he was better at their jobs than they were. And he's probably making less money than them too, despite having a career in something actually useful.

I think people moaned because there was video review elsewhere in sport and it was used well, so people thought "why accept human error when we have things to prevent against human error?" Now we see them use VAR to get to the wrong decision in about 12 seconds, even though they somehow go through the process correctly and still come to the wrong decision, or spent something like 5 minutes reviewing things that are clear as day. I agree with you that the system doesn't allow the best to go straight to the top. But that's because the system is an old boys club and they're rewarding their mates. Systems can be improved upon, but it's only going to happen if enough people demand it and there's public will for it. It's clear the public doesn't have the will for it, though, so there's no point in hoping for better officiating tbh.

You think it's surprising seeing the US and other big western countries take Israel's side? The US gives them $6B a year to spend on US weapons, there was never any doubt that Biden wouldn't be at bat for Israel.

Republicans tried round 2 of getting a new house speaker leading to the GOP pro-pedo candidate Jim Jordan to be the speaker and he fell short of becoming one of the most powerful people in the US due to 20 of his party members objecting to him being speaker. The minority leader of the house got more votes than him for speakership. Truly a party in unity, some on this forum might say the party is "as unified as it's ever been" There was another vote scheduled for today, but it had to be postponed because the GOP is in such shambles.

I just don't buy the argument that these are the best people to be officiating matches in a billion pound industry. It's statistically improbable that there's no good referee in London, the UK's most populated city, that could make their way up to refereeing in the premier league. Look at how many of the officials there are that are from right around the same area. To me... that looks like an "old boys club" - it's hard to get membership if you're not mates with the people already in the club. And the least qualified person in the audio of what was going on during the VAR seemed to be the only person that was actually paying attention to anything going on... so it's even harder to convince me that PMGOL's selected the best possible candidates to officiate matches. He somehow ended up looking like the most qualified official involved in the match. And he wasn't even an official. Referee mistakes were just more forgivable before VAR and hawkeye and all of that shite. Now they've got so much help and they're still making mistakes that shouldn't have been made, I've got no sympathy for them. If the media thinks the referee spectacle encourages viewers, I think they're pretty wrong. I've watched 1 football match since the incident, I didn't really enjoy it, probably my mistake for watching the league match instead of the Europa League - I've enjoyed the international break because it's been some time off from me caring about football. My interest in the league would probably have been rekindled a bit if PMGOL decided to clean up it's act a bit. Perhaps Howard Webb could do with a swift Constantine Hatzidakis elbow to the head.

A rocket coming from the Gaza side of the border failing and crashing down? Israel's committing enough war crimes on it's own to where if even Al Jazeera, which is not exactly unbiased in the conflict, is agreeing that this hospital was struck by a failed rocket... it probably was the case. Hamas rockets failing and killing Palestinians isn't really anything new. It's not exactly state of the art rocket technology they're using. It's not like Hamas killing more Palestinians somehow absolves Israel of bombing a school or bombing areas they've told people to evacuate to. Those are pretty clearly war crimes, I don't think we need to have more fabricated to make the case that the IDF's committing war crimes. Hamas is also very clearly capable of killing Palestinians as well.

No but typically you don't pay someone that much when they demonstrate they can't really do the job either.