> I have a half-non-serious idea that these small scale wars (compared to WWI / II) that pop up around the world from time to time occur to maintain at least some state of force-readiness and to make use of ordnance with a limited shelf life.
That's a key pillar of the Western Military–industrial complex.
> Everything else is just a ruse, and people like you and myself are unwittingly divided over meaningless conflict in far off lands, and would probably get along really well as colleagues or friends.
Sometimes, but energy/resource wars are real. Wars and regime changes to get access to specific resources or ensure labor/resources stay dirt cheap for first-world countries at the expensive of meager to destitute quality of life for those living in such areas, producing the goods we consume. The neoliberal imperial economic machine.
A good current example is the situation in Venezuela, where Trump is suddenly pretending to care about the quality of life of their citizens, and lying about the volume of drugs produced there, when the real story is the gigantic oil deposits that Trump's benefactors want to regain access to.
The other problem is that innocent people have died, and at scale, and the checks and bombs are signed by the US. It's not even just Palestine. There was Cablegate, if you remember, the infamous helicopter video, public documentation of the way that civilians are treated in these proxy wars.
Just in the last month, in Darfur, we've seen so much bloodshed that you could see pools of blood and dead bodies from orbiting satellites. An amount of people rivaling entire body count of the number of people killed since the recent Israeli invasion of Palestine, killed in less than a week, slaughtered like pigs... and various Western governments have their fingers all over this war, too, funding and arming factions both directly and indirectly.
And Netanyahu is no different here. He knew exactly what would happen. We'd all watched what happened when the US funded rebel groups that ended up seeding what became Al-Qaeda, our refusal to address real concerns levied by the group, to ignore increasing threats of action draw attention to the international crimes of the US. Then, even when faced with evidence that something like 9/11 was likely to occur, we just continued business as usual and let it happen, immediately pulled out the Patiot Act, which was promoted by Bush but based on earlier legislation penned by Biden himself, because one should never waste a good tragedy. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveil...
Then we invaded the Middle East and for what? Oil. It took 25 years for us to disengage, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan once we left, so we've only increased the level of fascist governance in the world.
Netanyahu's war is a mockery of human life, and there is a reason the International Criminal Court has a warrant for his arrest, and why the Imperial US continues to cover for him.
> Thanks for continuing the conversation and not getting triggered by my probably immature responses. I do think Jesse Lee Peterson does have a point though.
I don't know much of him except that he's a religious zealot white nationalist conservative, what point do you refer to? Was it something he said about Palestine, or about conflict?
That's a key pillar of the Western Military–industrial complex.
> Everything else is just a ruse, and people like you and myself are unwittingly divided over meaningless conflict in far off lands, and would probably get along really well as colleagues or friends.
Sometimes, but energy/resource wars are real. Wars and regime changes to get access to specific resources or ensure labor/resources stay dirt cheap for first-world countries at the expensive of meager to destitute quality of life for those living in such areas, producing the goods we consume. The neoliberal imperial economic machine.
A good current example is the situation in Venezuela, where Trump is suddenly pretending to care about the quality of life of their citizens, and lying about the volume of drugs produced there, when the real story is the gigantic oil deposits that Trump's benefactors want to regain access to.
The other problem is that innocent people have died, and at scale, and the checks and bombs are signed by the US. It's not even just Palestine. There was Cablegate, if you remember, the infamous helicopter video, public documentation of the way that civilians are treated in these proxy wars.
Just in the last month, in Darfur, we've seen so much bloodshed that you could see pools of blood and dead bodies from orbiting satellites. An amount of people rivaling entire body count of the number of people killed since the recent Israeli invasion of Palestine, killed in less than a week, slaughtered like pigs... and various Western governments have their fingers all over this war, too, funding and arming factions both directly and indirectly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/11/15/sudan-el-fas...
And Netanyahu is no different here. He knew exactly what would happen. We'd all watched what happened when the US funded rebel groups that ended up seeding what became Al-Qaeda, our refusal to address real concerns levied by the group, to ignore increasing threats of action draw attention to the international crimes of the US. Then, even when faced with evidence that something like 9/11 was likely to occur, we just continued business as usual and let it happen, immediately pulled out the Patiot Act, which was promoted by Bush but based on earlier legislation penned by Biden himself, because one should never waste a good tragedy. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveil...
Then we invaded the Middle East and for what? Oil. It took 25 years for us to disengage, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan once we left, so we've only increased the level of fascist governance in the world.
Netanyahu's war is a mockery of human life, and there is a reason the International Criminal Court has a warrant for his arrest, and why the Imperial US continues to cover for him.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu
> Thanks for continuing the conversation and not getting triggered by my probably immature responses. I do think Jesse Lee Peterson does have a point though.
I don't know much of him except that he's a religious zealot white nationalist conservative, what point do you refer to? Was it something he said about Palestine, or about conflict?