Yes, I am ignoring the US military; because it is irrelevant. It’s like arguing that a man’s car can’t be stolen because he’s a heavyweight boxing champion. How many bases do you need to build before the US is immune to sabotage and subversion? How much money do you need to spend on guns before disinformation campaigns don’t work? It is not as simple as one country being weaker than another. Different countries have different capabilities depending on what they have focused on. Russia has been building it’s disinformation pipeline for a long time and has always been very good at exploiting corruption. The US is not very good at defending itself from those kinds of attacks as experts have been warning for frickin decades. This is not a video game where election interference is only targetable on nations in your level range and national strength can neatly be condensed into a single number and compared.

Or have I misunderstood your argument and your arguing that Putin has nothing to force Trump to obey him? Yet still in that argument the US military and the assassinations are still irrelevant. Trump is Putin’s puppet not because Putin is a master manipulator dangling some blackmail over Trump’s head. Putin’s an unhinged, cowardly nutjob who spends most of his time hiding in a bunker marinating in the propaganda he himself commissioned. No, it’s because Trump is a moron who accepts simple answers and lashes out at anyone who tells him he’s wrong. Trump is a stupid man smart enough to know he’s an idiot but terrified people will realise he’s an idiot. He is a weak man desperate to be recognised as a strong one. So when someone who he views as a strong man dangles the potential for their approval in front of him he wags his tail like a good little dog. The former Australian PM talked about how Trump looked at Putin with awe to the degree that it was creepy. That is why Putin worked so hard to get him elected, why Trump spends so long on phone calls with Putin and why the military might of the US has no bearing on whether or not Trump will do as Putin tells him to. Trump is also very, very willing to accept bribes in whatever form they take and shown no limits to what he is willing to sell out for those bribes.

Or are easily manipulated narcissists. Trump before running for office in the first place laundered money for Russian oligarchs and an extensive and prolonged Russian based disinformation is the main reason he has the cult he does. Also key point: everything Trump has done indicates he is a coward. It doesn’t matter how strong a coward is

Did you know that the Gazan bomb disposal teams are some of the most skilled in the world? The reason for this is so they can disarm and disassemble unexploded Israeli bombs so that the explosives can be repurposed and fired back. So a surprisingly large portion of the explosives that Hamas used were supplied by Israel via their long-term sporadic bombing of Gaza and anything resembling major infrastructure.

Allow me to address a question the pro-Russian guy keeps dodging; Wagner is no longer participating in the Ukraine war. I don’t know the full details but after their mutiny, they were sent back to Africa and other foreign countries far from Russia and have been working to shore up Russian-friendly dictatorships and regimes. But they have been kept well away from Ukraine and Russia ever since. Part of what they’ve been doing is selling and advertising their services as consultants and support to keep people in power. This helps Russia build influence which is something it desperately needs right now. Wagner being in Venezuela would not be strange. It would mean the guy who is yelling about the CIA trying to overthrow him has accepted Russian help. In fact considering how active Wagner has been in involving themselves anywhere where they can get a foothold it’d be weird if Wagner weren’t in Venezuela.

The US and international pressure. So optics basically. Kind of like how they made ‘efforts’ at peace and a two-state solution over the past decades just to show they were trying. Those deals involved things like all the Isreali settlers remaining in Palestine, continuing to live under Isreali laws despite living in Palestine and for the IDF to be the defense and security forces for both countries. Or things like all the arable land going to Isreal and Palestine getting cut up into multiple enclaves.

Isreal has been obstructing aid from crossing the border for the longest time. The US even started airdropping stuff in because the Isreal was disrupting aid convoys from crossing into Palestine. They even had to start building a pier because Isreal wasn’t letting in any aid. After a lot of international pressure Isreal relented and stopped deliberately screwing up the aid convoys. Except the moment that happened settlers suddenly started knowing when and where every aid convoy was crossing into Palestine and started attacking them.

No, no it doesn’t. Suicide is a sin but Christianity absolutely glorifies self-sacrifice for the religion. I mean you’ve heard of martyrs right? It became a core tenant of the religion in the early roman days that dying for the faith gets you straight into heaven. Glorifying dying for the faith is a massive part of Christianity too. In Islam committing suicide is a sin unless you’re self-sacrificing yourself for the faith and dying for the faith also gets you straight into heaven. Just like in Christianity. They’re both Abrahamic faiths and have a lot of the same roots.

So yeah what the fuck are you talking about? They are no more self-sacrificing than anyone else. They’re just fucking people. They’re all just people. Why can’t we just treat them like people?

50% of the population of Gaza was under 18 based on Israeli numbers for Gaza prior to October. This means 50% of the population wasn’t even alive when that vote happened since it happened 18 years ago! Fun fact about that vote; Hamas represented themselves as significantly more moderate in the run-up to the election only to drop that the moment they got elected and murder all their political opposition. They have since continued to murder outspoken political dissidents and quash any efforts for new elections.

A twenty-year-old election that was run on lies tells us nothing about the feelings of the people of Gaza in the current day. It doesn’t tell us how much they support Hamas now and it certainly tells us nothing about how much they value their lives.

Though your twisted rationlisation tells me a lot about how you value their lives.

It’s a shame their definition of Hamas includes all Palestinians.

So if your home was invaded in a war that became an unrelenting meat grinder you’d advocate surrender and submission? You’d happily allow things to degenerate into a decades-long insurgency? You’d happily endure the heavy-handed crackdowns the invading government enforced on anyone and everyone who held even the slightest shred of sympathy for the insurgents? You’d accept that the bloody and brutal insurgency was better than the full-scale war despite the constant uncertainty? No, you wouldn’t, would you? You’d advocate surrender and submission again. You’d tell the insurgents to lay down arms because people were dying, you’d tell them that enduring the invader’s harsh rule was better than the suffering inflicted in the fight. You’d tell them to give up.

I do not understand how you do not see the stance you take as the insult it is. I do not understand why you think people should stand down as their freedom is stripped away from them. Putin has made it clear, in a great many speeches, that they resent and reject the idea of Ukranian identity. Yet you tell the Ukranians to surrender and hold no ire to the Russians who levelled so many Ukrainian cities with artillery.

I should really proofread my comments before I post them but then again you don’t strike me as worth the effort. I am well aware eastern Ukraine speaks Russian and has for a long time, I was talking exclusively about the rebels coming from nowhere.

Oh the Russian speaking population that sprang up in rebellion from nowhere in pretty much a single day with a clear and organised command structure from day one, with matching gear, uniforms and weapons and a bizarrely poor understanding of the local geography despite supposedly being locals. You know they attacked a movie theatre because they thought it was a local government center? Those rebels? The ones the locals didn’t recognise? The ones whose casualty numbers had a weird correlation with Russian servicemen dying from unexplained causes? Those rebels?

Now I normally don’t call ‘Russian bot/troll’ too often but Russian propaganda about this is so poor I have a hard time coming to any other conclusion.