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They are far left. LOL - no wonder you consider yourself to be a conservative - in your mind apperently everyone right of castro is a conservative

So can you dispute anything they said? Anything you think is wrong? Anything other than just complaining about the source? No? Nothing? Kay - thanks, bye.

Not in America. Wages have out-paced inflation. Haven’t you figured out that you’re being fed lies by a fake news media? The damn inflation figures are posted. Anybody can look them up. But you’re subscribed to “Up means Down, Right means Left” thinking. The figures speak for themselves.

Who told you ^this? FOS LIES? Wages have exceeded inflation for several months now. LMAO

Trudeau is socially leftist. And a corrupt neoliberal sure, his party usually does what their masters want.

I feel sorry for the Ukrainian people. I think that they were just used and abused by Zelenski and the Americans. There are thousands and thousands of Russian soldiers dead, ditto for Ukrainian soldiers, ditto for Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian communities are flattened and those people who were neighbours and friends are now scattered & in mourning... For what? The Russians moved their border west a bit, Ukraine's not getting into NATO, and some American weapons manufacturers and their investors raked in heaps of cash... What a farce. I wonder how long Taiwan is gonna last now, knowing that America's war chest is depleted and their citizens are sick of war.

There's not a leftist here that can name a positive achievement by Trudeau or Biden. Those two just aren't achievers. All they do is virtue signal and f everything up royally. Yet somehow, leftards on this site can't find any fault with them, and they cling to every anti-Trump anti-Poilievre story that comes along like drowning men clutching at straws. Who on God's green earth would look out their window and think to themselves "Another term of Biden/Trudeau is just what the doctor ordered"? These leftards do nothing but spew lies, exaggerate, omit, cheer on FBI crimes, and their campaign slogans are platitudes like "If Trump wins it's the end of democracy!" On average, these guys are 4 yr olds at best. I can't help but wonder how much actual value our countries get out of 10M leftists... What do they contribute that's worthwhile? We really need to take the warning labels off of everything. This is what we get for trying to defy Darwinism.

The sad thing about it all is the guy can't even speak to his own defence. Gotta use the same deflection, slandering of others, conspiratorial claims and is 'too important' to be accountable for his own actions. He's just been nailed to pay the $400,000 legal fees of the NY Times and reporters for suing them for telling the truth about him. hasn't publicly revealed his peronal taxes in eight years now, he doesn't want the fools that back him to see. Should he somehow qualify to be on the 2024 ballot and get elected, it won't be a massive brain fart of the American public like 2016, it will be The Triumph of The Ign0roids.

So invading Kyiv was just the Russian Army getting lost on the way to Donbass? LMAO You're FOS Why would I live with YOUR FANTASIES? There's a reason why you POST NO EVIDENCE for ^these rants.

and replace him with another corrupt autocrat. Be careful what you wish for.

Yeah, there was a conspiracy to stop Trump from being president. It's called voting. Millions and millions of voters conspired to kick the corrupt autocrat out of the White House.

You've managed to turn the concept of hate speech upside down. No one thinks that saying "Stop commiting genocide" is hate speech. But advocating for genocide is. Just follow the hate.

Geez, good thing you checked in with house Republicans rather than economists. 🙄

Sounds terrific. God, I'm sick of the divisiveness and invasion of our borders.

I cannot wait for Donnie to get back in and implement his muslim ban, end wars in Israel and the Ukraine, and restore the west to a time of economic strength.

How can you expect anything less from a group of human-like creatures that have done everything but literally climb up Donald Trump's ass? It is a derangement syndrome of the highest order.

Not in New York. In New York City, it's "A political witch hunt is a political witch hunt".

Oh man LOL I will post it again... If Trump was charged with inciting an erection, could not that be construed as a good thing. I'm sure there are many who would agree.

Myata, today’s conservative politicians generally are liberal compared to leaders like Thatcher and Reagan. They wouldn’t privatize every last utility or railroad. Also some of these leaders made their own weird and damaging policies that aren’t really conservative, like Thatcher’s poll tax that penalized people for having kids. The old right and left opposition doesn’t fit anymore except perhaps in the area of taxation. The Republicans of the 80’s were a party of the elite. Now that’s the Democrats for sure. All major US and British parties are big spenders and have been for a long time. Think of our debt under Mulroney. I don’t know about Fizo, but Orban has tried to protect the local traditional way of life in the face of recklessly massive and unchecked immigration mandated in a top down EU that pressures national governments. I like Italy’s Meloni and anyone who supports the family. A nihilistic top down statism is destroying local decision-making and traditions. We see this in Trudeau’s “Post-National” Canada, where billions of taxpayer dollars are spent trying to make Canada please international bodies without respect to the economic and cultural wellbeing of Canadians. However, I have become a social conservative, not just an economic one. I used to be a Liberal, but I see how the left has been overtaken by activist radicals who work against most of what I value about Canada and life in general. Generally I support anyone who is against big controlling government and who is against destabilizing family through identity politics, EDI, gender ideology, Marxism, and nihilism.

Trump has been frequently mentioning Al Capone in his recent speeches. Here’s one: ”Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time…” (1:45 in the linked video). At 2:42 in the video, Trump states that he will abuse power and become a dictator the first day he’s elected President. I know you’re gonna do your little MAGA bullshlt dance and claim that you have a super-power which lets you know what Trump really meant. But he said what he said, and when a man says Al Capone was one of the greatest of all time and that he will be a dictator and abuse his power starting on the first day of his Presidency… I believe that. Cause when someone tells you he’s the devil, believe it https://youtu.be/AHhLlAvXp9w?si=020gf--_YKhCAn9s

Your understanding is not on point. I do not like to see any potential human aborted, but that does not give me the right to impose my desire to save it onto another. Mine is a complicated view sometimes but I always take the moral position which is usually not where the religious are.

Ok let's examine this. A. The economy sucks and the public knows it. Check the polls. B & C. The USA just announced the funding is coming to a screeching halt. They're cutting Ukraine loose. This was always inevitable to those who rely on reality for positions, rather that feelings and lies. D. Big deal. They bombed a mosquito. E. Hamas made its bed. Now they can die in it. Again...big deal. F. While shitting on the very base of the global economy resulting in wild inflation everywhere. Way t' go Brandon! G. Again...causing huge inflation. Not to mention that to this day, nobody can prove there's any crisis worthy of this crap. Your welcome.

I get it. You pretend you’re a lawyer. Trump’s hero, Al Capone, was convicted for tax fraud. Are you going to tell us that Al Capone was a good man? No, he ordered murders. But criminals are criminals. They break lots of laws, lots of times. So tax evasion is what they managed to convict him him for. Jack Smith chose to indict Trump on just four charges related to January 6, because he didn’t want a case that would drag on for years. He picked the low hanging fruit which was most likely to get a conviction. That’s how the law works. You guys are all a bunch of liars. January 6 was an effort to keep Trump in office. It was organized by Donald Trump, based on a Big Lie. The election was not stolen; no matter how many times Trump says. He lost. And if there was fraud, there are legal ways to get recounts, audits, investigations, and lawsuits. And Trump had them all and lost. You don’t get to incite a riot and threaten the lives of Congressmen because you lose your election. It was criminal and over 200 people are in prison because of it.

First, when Trump makes $7.8 million from foreign governments while President, you excuse it. Second, when Hunter Biden makes far less money, you make a big deal about it. To be clear, Trump violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause by receiving money from foreign governments while he was in office. Plain and simple. Pay Attention: The Emoluments Clause says that RECEIVING the money is not allowed, PERIOD. Does not matter if President does any favors in return. But Hunter Biden did not break a law by accepting work with Burisma per se, and that’s the only alleged crime you boneheads have come up with. The rest is pure speculation. For the millionth time: I don’t give a fck about Hunter Biden. If he did break a law, he can go to jail. I didn’t vote for him! He isn’t a government official! Got it? If there’s evidence of crime, the prosecutor will charge him. No crime has been tied to Joe Biden. Your big “evidence” is that Dad made four car payments for his son, who paid Dad back. And Dad calls his son on the phone. WTF? So weak!

Err... no. https://budget.house.gov/press-release/fact-check-setting-the-record-straight-on-bidenomics Biden has been a complete and total failure. Not one thing he's done, has resulted in any benefit to the population.

Well this is what happens when you put your eggs in the wrong basket. Or like my pappy used to say, don't put your donkey in the wrong stables...

Just say I'm f@cked up, my brain is. Would make way more sense. Several is the word for "most" the hundreds of them, right? It's quite astounding how partisanship distorts perception of the reality, regardless of the chosen side.

Even after being told many times how and why Trump sabotaged the US COVID response, nothing ever sinks into the WCM mind. Cognitive dissonance at its WORST. He just continues to believe everything he hears on FOS LIES despite them being LIARS proven to the tune of $800M.

Pull your head out of Trump's ass. Biden's economy is better. He's not just raised, but multiplied, our standing in the international community. His infrastructure and manufacturing legislation is ambitious and dramatic. His China policy is actually effective, not like something a third grader drew up in a napkin. You can whine and moan about inflation--inflation has been high--but wages and disposable income are still net positive, so the pain is largely psychological. Americans are better of in almost any measurable category than they were even under Trump's best days, but to mention the night and day difference from the dumpster fire Trump left for Biden after the disastrous Covid mismanagement.

Awww, caught in more lies so you stamp your feet and lash out. Poor little Trumpie. Here's a thought. They actually make meds that can help quiet the voices in your head. Just saying.

I do recall the time I had a number of Israelis out on the boat and while looking at a herd of about a 1000 sea-lions I asked what sorts of wild animals they had in Israel. Two piped up in unison, Gazans! The pause around the boat was noticeably pregnant. One of the guys who piped up got a shot in the ribs from his girlfriend's elbow. I've had Palestinians onboard before too but I like to leave the politics tied to the dock. I think I've met enough oppressed people in my time to know I can't support it anymore than I support terrorism or blowing away kids while holding up a paper convention or doctrine like it was a gold shield. Just before Oct 7 there were Gazan protests against Hamas that were on par with the demonstrations taking place in Israel against Likud. I've also posted articles that indicate Hamas only has the support of %42 to %44 of Palestinians. Perhaps being a Canadian you're conditioned to believing %44 is a massive majority. You always seem to think the reported number of Gazans killed is way to high. As I recall you also seem to think Muslim kids stop being kids once they grow a hint of peach-fuzz so for sure you'll be betting your sweet bippy that the number of kids being reported as casualties will be way WAY over-inflated. And what makes you think you'd be immune to this sort of indoctrination if it was done to you starting the day you were born and then every single day of your entire life? What makes you so special? Oh right, you don't live in a place where colonization, oppression and subjugation ever took place. Well you do but you've been indoctrinated to ignore that since you were a kid so...shit happens.

People set the agenda. There are many ways to do this. It's not four years of dictatorship in the slighest. And that's when it's a majority - right now these days we have mostly minorities. Claiming it's a 'dictatorship' and we're 'helpless' is what people say when they want to excuse the fact they didn't get off their butts and do something about what they didn't like.

Of course you can, seeing as you hang on to every lie told by the Hamas propagandists.

Actually, you're full of shit. Trump has 240 Electoral votes vs the Hair sniffer's 176. https://www.270towin.com/2024-presidential-election-polls/

The polls actually show Trump.losing big time even in his own party with each trial he attends and tries to turn it into a campaign whistle stop and rant. His popularity vs. Nikki Haley also has dropped over 20 points just this past week after all his bluster about winning his New York trial showed a lot of voting Republicans just how deluded he is.

Here's a fact for you. Ukraine is not a democracy nor are the Ukrainians free. Actually...a lot of 'em are dead and a lot of 'em ran away. *sigh* More dumb...

Still worth only half of what it was in the fall of 2021. Bitcoin isn't investing, it's gambling but fill your boots.

All I can say is hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! 😝

Apparently you don't.

If found guilty of fraud he will appeal. The appeal will be heard in another jurisdiction made up of normal people and the charges tossed out. Case closed.

If Trump was charged with inciting an erection, could not that be construed as a good thing. I'm sure there are many who would agree.

The POLARIS in India was old and it’s breakdown is no surprise. The Challenger, assuming its one of the new ones, is a bit of a surprise an I assume just unlucky. I guess even his aircraft are sick of working for him.

So if I understand you correctly the "right wing" is in moral decay because they oppose abortion??????? I am new here and I've only read a few of your posts but i have to hope you're trolling because if you actually believe some of the stuff I've seen you post then something is very wrong.

LOL - love the commie line Well there is still speculation that he'll step down soon. But it would have to be fairly soon, or he'll really screw them up. Mind you there's also speculation he'll FALL down soon, and break a hip. Which would take him out of the race too. I think it's probable that he'll be the one running mainly for the reasons you mention - who else have they got right now? At least it's got to be a silver lining for them that if they lose then biden's out of the picture for them and trump ONLY gets 4 years and then he's gone for them. And you never know, campaigns matter and biden could pull it off, in which case they only have to prop him up with a stick for 4 years and they can move on. Yes - guns, title 42 and dr seuss. The trinity of evil.

Guns and Title 42 are the greatest threats snowflakes have ever known.

Both sides have beaten their heads against the wall for longer than I've been alive. And it's obvious to both they just haven't beaten them hard enough...

Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history The illusions, projections and selective histories of both sides have brought us to the current moment. These narratives compete with one another, but in another way are complementary versions of the same story Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail (JAVIER SORIANO/AFP via Getty Images, Carl Court/Getty Images) M.G. Conford is the writer and director of the documentaries Through The Eyes Of Enemies, Not On Any Map, and Fragments of Jerusalem. He is an associate professor of film at Toronto Metropolitan University. Just over 30 years ago, I was travelling between Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, filming a documentary, Through The Eyes of Enemies, which charted the reactions to the signing of the initial Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a high-water mark, the cresting of hope, and everywhere I went in the region you could feel its rise. It’s not that the tensions had evaporated; they most certainly had not. But there was a shimmer of possibility and people throughout the region – not all people of course, but sizable majorities – were almost giddy with the incipient change. At the White House in 1993, Israeli and Palestinian leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands in front of U.S. president Bill Clinton after signing peace accords.Ron Edmonds/The Associated Press Thirty years later, at this most terrible and devastating moment in the Middle East, so far from that one of hope, it’s important to understand both sides’ illusions, projections and selective histories that have brought us to this point. These narratives compete with one another, but in another way are complementary versions of the same story. The ironies abound. The Jewish people have been placed in the position of “colonialists” when they themselves were desperately searching for an escape from the horrific antisemitism in Europe that had wiped out the vast majority of them. The Palestinians have been cast as the fierce and implacable foe the Jews have always feared when they were the ones being dispossessed and impoverished. Duelling fantasies of history as well: the original Zionist myth of a land without people for a people without land, entirely ignoring the people that were already on the land. The Palestinian denial of the ancient and deep connection of Jews to the same land, claiming there had never been a temple in Jerusalem, that Jews had not been the original refugees, expelled from the same land many centuries earlier, and that they did not carry it with them wherever they had wandered. And more: Israelis claiming Palestinians all left voluntarily in 1948, rather than the many chased out by the Israeli army; and Palestinians, willfully ignoring the many Jewish refugees chased from their own homes in Arab lands. Throughout, the twinned wounds of homelessness and national yearning mirror one another. The past decades have been a tragedy of lost opportunities. But it helps not at all to point fingers of blame. This has been a blood sport in the region for nearly a century already, each side prepared with the recitation of a sad litany of atrocities (Deir Yassin, Hebron in 1929, Hebron again in 1994, bombings in Netanya, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and on and on) to justify their actions. The past decades have also brought less and less contact between the populations. Since the early 2000s, the Separation Wall (or Security Fence, or what have you) has not only hemmed West Bank Palestinians in; it has also severed much of the opportunity to encounter one another in daily life. And that lack of human contact is an essential part of the problem. The rise of maximalist voices – the Jewish settler and Greater Israel movement on one side, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with their mirroring claims to all the land, on the other – amplify disinformation and make other voices faint and hard to hear. Bullet holes show through the window of a kindergarten in Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the communities attacked by Hamas.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images It should not need to be stated: The brutality of Oct. 7 was not justified in any way by political or historical injustice. The acts of cruel and gratuitous violence were simply crimes against humanity, committed by a group, Hamas, that is dedicated to wiping out both the state of Israel and all Jews living within it. To not unequivocally denounce them, to see them as part of a legitimate fight for freedom for Palestinians, is an act of moral confusion. The last time I saw such horrific images of dead bodies was in 1994 when I was working for CNN as a freelance film editor in Jerusalem and was called in early one morning for duty. For the next 24 hours, I edited story after story about an extremist Jewish religious settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacring 29 Muslims and injuring more than 100 at prayer in a mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Those images haunted me for months after. They too depicted an act against humanity, to be condemned absolutely, without equivocation. In each the role of religion, the way in which images of the enemy are embedded in the holy narratives of each people, cannot be ignored. Religious right-wing settlers will whisper to you that Palestinians are Amalek, the hated Biblical enemy, and thus there is a special sacred injunction to wipe them out. “Do not spare them,” the Bible says, “kill every man and women and child.” Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, too, made reference to wiping Hamas out like Amalek. This denigration of the humanity of Palestinians contributes to the acceptance by many Israelis of the massive and criminally indiscriminate bombing campaign in Gaza, which too must be condemned, and halted. Islamic texts, meanwhile, have numerous hateful references to Jews. One hadith that notably says “if the Jew will hide behind a tree even the tree will say come and kill him” – is echoed in official pronouncements from Hamas. No one can doubt that the fundamentalist Islamic credo they follow had a large part in the celebratory attitude of the attackers; one telephoned to excitedly tell his mother that he had “slain 10 Jews” with his own hands. Baruch Goldstein carried out his slaughter one week after the biblical tale of Amalek was read in synagogue. On Oct. 7, 2023, when more than 1,200 dead and mutilated bodies were strewn across the killing fields near Gaza, with the details of gruesome barbarity filmed in real time by the murderers, you could hear over and over again the triumphant shouts: “God is Great.” Portraits of captured Israelis cover a wall in Tel Aviv on Dec. 28, more than 11 weeks after militants took scores of people into Gaza from surrounding communities.AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images Israeli tanks sit near the southern Gaza border, while smoke rises from air strikes over central Gaza. As the new year began, Israel said it would scale back troop numbers but continue the offensive for months more.Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters, Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images Wounded Palestinians get care at a Khan Younis hospital on New Year's Eve, when Gaza's health ministry raised the region's death toll to more than 21,800 people and rising. The Hamas-run ministry's tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.Mohammed Dahman/The Associated Press Israelis were deeply shocked by the insensitivity of much of the world to the deliberate and cruel slaughter of their friends and families on Oct. 7, and by how rapidly they were painted as aggressors, as somehow deserving to be massacred in their homes and beds or while out in a field listening to music. Meanwhile Palestinians, witnessing the continuing obliteration of entire extended families, wonder in fury and anguish if the deaths of their many thousands of civilians actually count. The pain among families on both sides is raw and utterly shattering. But images of the dead and wounded also quickly became instrumentalized as fodder in a global propaganda war, with supporters of each side blinding themselves to the essential humanity of the other. In late October, I listened to a “Teach-in for Palestine” at the university at which I teach. Sponsored in part by the faculty association, I had expected, or at least hoped, that the teach-in would be an opportunity to learn about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to engage in critical thinking and listen to opposing viewpoints. Where else if not universities should such discussions take place? But that is not what I experienced. I was surprised that not once was the name of Hamas mentioned, nor any sympathy evinced for the Israeli victims of the massacre. Had people attending not seen the almost unbearable pain in the face of the Israeli mother whose two daughters, aged 8 and 15, were kidnapped and taken to Gaza? The grandmother whose school-age grandchildren were shot and killed? Was there no room for empathy, or any distinction between just cause and heinous crime? A protest banner in Montreal decries the events in Gaza as a genocide.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press It became clear that the lives of slaughtered Israeli civilians, many of them peace activists, were not thought to be worth mentioning, though the words “genocide” and “massacre” were used often to describe the policies of Israel. Genocidal. Neo-Nazi. These are terms that freeze thought. Even setting aside for a moment any inaccuracy or barbed callousness, they simply allow no space for discussion. The term “colonizers” was used frequently, and I wondered how the Jewish family from Yemen that had travelled by donkey and foot to escape persecution in that country, or the 85-year-old man born in Iraq and now a hostage of Hamas, were colonizers, let alone “white” and “European” (the most common modifiers added to “colonizer”). This was sloppy and simplistic thinking, affixing labels to a morally complex problem. A world of binaries, of cartoon heroes and villains, has infected discourse in almost every public forum. As someone who has tried to make sense of this conflict through a series of films over the course of nearly 30 years, and who has vehemently disagreed with the injustice of many Israeli policies, the inability of students, and more than a few professors, to deal with this complexity was heartbreaking. I should say that I attended the event over Zoom, as I’d had to go to the dentist an hour or so before to treat a broken filling, and my mouth was still numbed. My dentist seemed shaken by something and I assumed it was the events in the Middle East. But actually it was something closer to home. His friend, a Jewish doctor, had received a message on his office answering machine that morning. He asked me if I’d like to hear it, as his friend had shared the recording with him. This is what it said: “Dr. –, you f*cking Jew, Hitler killed six million of your people then you came to our land and now you are killing our children. We will come for you and kill you and kill your whole family, we will kill your wife, kill all your children, you motherf*cking Jew.” That was the end of the message. I have filmed in the middle of a demonstration on the streets south of Damascus, amid thousands shouting “Death to Israel, Death to America, Death to the Jews.” I have seen the scrawled graffiti on Israeli walls saying “Death to Arabs,” and in the West Bank saying “Kill the Jews.” I have seen the rictus of hate distorting faces on both sides of the conflict. But somehow none felt as chilling as listening to that recorded message in a dentist’s chair in Toronto. Perhaps because while this was an almost expected part of the landscape there, here, in multicultural, liberal Toronto, it felt like the upswell of hatred was now overflowing all boundaries, and seemingly reaching, well, everywhere. Meanwhile, at my university’s law faculty (dedicated to social justice and equity), 74 students – nearly one-quarter of the student body – released a statement saying that “all forms of Palestinian resistance” are justified. This statement came out within two weeks of the Hamas massacre. Slogans have replaced thought. And slogans are not adequate to what is a moment of real existential fear on both sides. 'Make hummus, not walls,' reads graffiti in Bethlehem on a barrier between the occupied West Bank, on this side, and Israel on the other.Maja Hitij/Getty Images More than 20 years ago I made a film (Not On Any Map) highlighting “unrecognized” Arab villages within Israel. These villages were created by state policies (similar to the policies in areas of the West Bank that Israel still controls) that prevent Israeli Arabs from getting building permits, running water, electricity, schools or medical clinics in the makeshift villages where they’ve been living since being evicted from their original villages soon after 1948. For making such a film, I was swung at by a right-wing settler and called an antisemite. (When I told him I was Jewish, he sputtered, in mimicry of an old Borscht Belt comic, “That’s the worst kind.”) The most acute current existential fear felt by Palestinians, as a nation, is around the forced movement of the population away from their homes in Gaza. In it, they detect clear echoes of the Nakba of 1948, when they were never allowed to return once the fighting had ceased. Such existential fears were amplified when Israeli Knesset member Ariel Kallner, among others, declared a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ‘48.” And they were further intensified when extremist religious settlers in the West Bank distributed pamphlets saying “You have one last opportunity to escape to Jordan. Afterward we’ll drive you away by force from our holy land.” Existential fear in Israel is equally deep. Israelis see the 150,000 Hezbollah missiles aimed at the north, along with those in Gaza. They see surrounding countries with largely Muslim populations that have, for most of Israel’s history, been hostile or at least deeply antagonistic to it. They see forces backed by Iran in Syria and in Yemen, and the Iranian regime itself, all committed to the death and destruction of the only Jewish state, created as a safe haven in a world that has shown time and again its violence and hostility. The latest wave of antisemitism throughout the world ­– including the shockingly rapid return of the most hateful caricatures of Jews – has paradoxically, and sadly, provided concrete reminder of the need for such a haven. For Palestinians, decades of dallying by Israel paired with the unchecked rise of settlements and worsening brutal repression in the West Bank contribute to their conviction that they are being played – that Israel has no intention of allowing a viable state of Palestine to exist, ever. Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad proclaimed on Lebanese television that Hamas will repeat Oct. 7-like attacks again and again and again until Israel is completely annihilated. “We will,” he says, “remove that country.” The return of the most elemental existential fears of both sides is what makes this current round of fighting so fierce and unrelenting. And that very fierceness paired with the continuing brutality only fuels ever-greater extremism, hatred and rejection on both sides. Israelis take shooting lessons in the West Bank settlement of Migdal Oz.ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images There has now been a decade or more of agreed-upon “wisdom” within Israel that a two-state solution is no longer possible, that there are too many settlements, that there is no functioning Palestinian governmental entity, that there will never be agreement on Jerusalem or the right of return, that there is no plan for all of this. Such wisdom has led to the Netanyahu conception (which Israelis call the conceptzia). The idea that the conflict can be “managed,” that the Palestinian people will accept their oppression and the control of the Israeli state over their lives, that Hamas can be a tool in keeping the Palestinians divided. This has manifested in the odious term “mowing the grass” to indicate a periodic incursion of forces or of bombing to keep resistance in check. After Oct. 7, does anyone think this is truly sustainable? There is only one way out of this morass. It has been the only way since the UN partitioned the land into what was supposed to have become two states, but because of the rejection of both Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states, never did. The tragedy is that one state, Israel, eventually thrived, and the other, the stillborn Palestine, and its people, remained in a state of perpetual impoverishment. And the suffocating and humiliating occupation that has gotten only worse these past 30 years plays directly into the hands of extremists such as Hamas. So yes, Palestine – and Palestinians – must be free, for their sake, and for the sake of the Israeli people as well. But not, as the slogan goes, from the river to the sea. And Israel must be safe and secure, its people free from the fear of attack. But also not in some mythical “Greater Israel” – from river to sea – and not at the cost of the endless domination of another people. The view from Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, includes the golden Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound around it. Access to the mosque, built on the site of ancient Jewish temples, is a contentious issue for Israelis and Palestinians.AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images Tent camps of displaced Palestinians stretch into the distance in Rafah, on the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt. Refugees from the north fled in droves to this southern city before Israel's ground offensive began.MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images Out near the edge of Jerusalem, in Kiryat HaYovel, there’s a park that contains a large playground sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle. It is known locally as HaMifletzet, the monster. Neighbourhood children play there, gleefully sliding out of the monster’s mouth. The artist intended it as a kind of lesson in resilience, but it’s hard not to read it as some great and insatiable Moloch. The danger of both sides being swallowed by such a malignant Moloch, the Canaanite god who jubilantly welcomed the sacrifice of children, is enormous. Israel must take extreme care. No one who has seen the horrific acts of brutality and murder in the Hamas videos can deny Israel’s right to pursue the perpetrators and do what it must to prevent their recurrence. But does anyone believe that the children and women killed by the massive aerial bombing in Gaza deserve such a fate? Or that their surviving relatives will not be filled with even more hate and desire for vengeance? Hamas, in its deliberate and cynical embedding within the civilian population, both invites and celebrates every Israeli bomb that kills the innocent, knowing it will only further inflame hatred in the region. And the anger, the hatred, the violence and the desire for vengeance from both sides threaten to overwhelm all else. But vengeance too is a kind of fantasy. For nothing – not the sorrow, not the anger, no hatred and no act of vengeance – can bring back the dead. And nothing will bring back the world as it was before Oct. 7. What is needed now is what is nearly impossible to achieve when the bullets and missiles and bombs are flying, when the wounds of grief are so recent, when blood is still in the air: a recognition of the depth of each other’s traumas. The terrifying cruelty of the brutal massacre and the hostage situation; the terrifying cruelty of the bombs that cannot distinguish between a child and an armed fighter; the horror of helplessness; the unrelenting wave of anger and heartbreak. All can be felt with the simplest of thought experiments: Your small child. Your son. Your daughter. Your mother. Your father. Your brother. Your sister. Events of the past few months are building a mountain of hate that will remain long after the dead are counted. And yet the future is still ahead. And to have a livable future requires a radical rethinking. If the loudest and angriest voices are allowed to dominate, in the region and outside of it, there is no hope whatsoever, and without hope the cruel calculus of fear, intimidation and violence is sure to reign. When I spoke to Palestinian philosopher and educator Sari Nusseibeh at a similar moment of strife, he said that though a change of conception might appear inconceivable in such a moment, “the distance from the present to the future is like a pane of glass. Just the thickness of a pane of glass.” What is required of us – and what the acts of continuing violence make so difficult to attain – is to hold the image of the other as a human being, as a mother, a child, as a wise old man or woman (or foolish young one), and, against all the urging toward hatred and vengeance, to make that, and that alone, the priority. Amos Oz once wrote that the imagining of the other is a moral imperative. It is, he said, “the most powerful antidote to fanaticism.” A dove flies over a ruined house in Khan Younis on Nov. 28, during a truce between Hamas and Israel. It lasted seven days before fighting resumed.Saleh Salem/Reuters For years, the right-wing in Israel – and Hamas in their way – have promulgated the notion that the peace process was an illusion, a mirage. But what events have shown is that the delusion, the Fata Morgana, was that there could ever be normality without finding a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the issue. Polls back in 1993 – before a cruel wave of Hamas suicide bombings and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undermined belief in the possibility – had support for a peace treaty among both Palestinians and Israelis running above 65 per cent. Since then, the far right in Israel and Hamas have shared the same goal: to put a halt to any possibility of the peaceful division of the land into mutually recognized stable states of Israel and Palestine. Even in the past few weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has boasted how he has stopped a Palestinian state from coming into existence in the past and how he will also in the future, arguing that the Hamas attack shows why he is right to do so. It is exactly this thinking which has brought us to where we are now. The sole way to escape the cycle of violence is to clearheadedly renounce all the maximalist and eliminationist fantasies and the dehumanizing caricatures that have led, and will continue to lead, to the horrifying shedding of the blood of thousands of men, women and children. In an interview I filmed before he passed away, the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua said that the weight of history and mythology was killing the people of the region, dominating and crushing them. “We have finally to ask ourselves,” he said, “are such things worth more than the small joys and pleasures of life itself?” Israeli soldiers carry a fallen comrade's coffin in Tel Aviv on Jan. 1.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters If there is any meaning to be gained from all these lost lives, it can only be this: to acknowledge that there will be no final victory, that five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will not be wiped from the map, and that neither will seven million Jewish Israelis. And to begin, yet again, the slow and painful work of accepting that no one’s victimhood eclipses the requirement to acknowledge the other’s, and to begin rebuilding the foundation – already begun these 30 wasted and blood-filled years ago – of two states, with security and freedom and sovereignty for each. Otherwise all that will come of the latest bitter brutal episode in this shared tragedy is children and their children and their children’s children doomed to repeat the cycle, to live their lives in fear and hatred. And on and on. A friend, usually vociferous, with whom I have often argued about the conflation of Zionism and colonialism along with the interpretation of various details of history, seemed subdued when I last saw him, his mood pained in much the same way as my own. The past no longer matters, he said. We should only talk about the future. In many ways this seemed the wisest thing I had heard these past months. Precisely in the depth of horror and revulsion at the current violence, in the anger and bereavement at the immense and devastating loss of innocent lives, perhaps there is paradoxically a glimmer of hope, of clarity, that the current state of things is both unsustainable and unbearable. As former Palestinian minister Ziad Abu Zayyad, now 83, said in an interview I filmed with him more than 15 years ago: “How long can this continue? Will we go on killing one another forever?” When Yitzhak Rabin agreed to sign the accord with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat just over 30 years ago, he sounded a simple clarion call in his speech: Enough of blood and tears. Enough! He did not say enough of Jewish blood and tears, but the blood and tears of both sides. Do we have the ears to hear those words now? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-israelis-and-palestinians-are-both-trapped-by-the-dangerous-fantasies/

In other news, some people stayed at Trump's hotels. Biden's a little ticked because Hunter never thought of that, he just thought selling influence would not be investigated.

It's just a joke. It does have a punchline, it's the part at the very end where everyone laughs and Dave is smiling. If there's no punchline, like Dave and Hannah sometimes do, then it's not a joke, they're preaching. Dave has said he has friends who are trans who come to his shows and laugh at his trans jokes. Dave has said that the predicament trans people find themselves in is funny. A woman trapped in a man's body is funny. It's like a sitcom setup. If people including trans people can't laugh at that at times then they take things too seriously and are too sensitive.

Is Mankind now ruled by evil? We worship the $. We are developing a potential life form...without a soul. We murder fully formed and conscious babies like common butchers. We take steps that destroy the poor. We preach that there are too many people on the planet. We live in fear and loathing. I think the truth is now obvious. And like the Luciferians and Illuminati have predicted...as we approach the end, the evil will no longer have to be hidden because...by then it'll already be too late. My advise. Fight back and keep your soul as clean as possible. Instill truth, respect and honour in your children. Recognize the evil and trust your senses.