Recent Comments

1. about 3 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   “Fanatics like you [@FJB] need to steal symbols from others because you lack the ability for critical thinking.”

   Another good example is Pepe the Frog:

   “Originally an apolitical character, Pepe was appropriated from 2015 to 2016 onward as a symbol of the alt-right movement. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) included Pepe in its hate symbol database in 2016, but said most instances of Pepe were not used in a hate-related context. Since then, [cartoonist creator Matt] Furie has expressed his dismay at Pepe being used as a hate symbol and has sued organizations for doing so.” —Wikipedia

2. about 3 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   “Indeed, the South put them [Confederate statues] up during the height of the Jim Crow era . . .”

   Some of them. Many others went up in the 1960s, as reactions to the Civil Rights Movement of that time.

3. about 4 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   The heck with the plot—love the pictures of the printing process!

4. about 4 hours ago on Doonesbury

   “Project 2025 and Agenda 47 lay out the blueprint for a Right Wing dictatorship. There is NOTHING similar on the Democrats’ side.”

   Aha! You see how well they’ve hidden it! /s

5. about 16 hours ago on Rob Rogers

   (…continued)

   “The Palestinians have refused every single solitary proposal for a two party state since the 1940s.”

   Two party state? The question of a two-state solution has a long and tangled history, with “proposals” on both sides that were designed to be unacceptable to the other. For a while it seemed that the Oslo accords might work, derailed by the Netanyahu-encouraged assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. (Look up “Two state solution” and “Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin”).

   PBS’s Frontline has had several interesting documentaries on the whole subject of “Netanyahu and the Road to War in Gaza” that might be educational for you.

   As a kid I collected savings to plant trees in the then-new State of Israel. What happened, and what should happen, to the Palestinians already living there, was never discussed, and should have been. We were led to believe the lie that everyone would live happily together. Uh uh. It was only later that I learned that a “Jewish state” meant a state for Jews only, with non-Jews either second-class citizens or people living under occupation. This is against the secular Jewish values I learned as a kid and still hold.

6. about 17 hours ago on Rob Rogers

   “Don’t know enough about Nat Turner to speak of it.”

   You don’t have to be a scholar to respond to a hypothetical. Read the Wikipedia article on Nat Turner’s Rebellion and tell me if you think that Turner “started” the race war, or at least that “current incident.”

   “Are you seriously claiming that Netanyahu is propping up the very people . . .”

   Sure—don’t you understand anything about the situation? Try Googling “netanyahu support hamas”. Here are a few links I came up with—let’s see how many I can sneak by the nannybot (remove the spaces, of course):

   nytimes .com /2023 /12 /10 /world /middleeast /

   npr .org /2024 /01 /26 /1226691760 /the-long-and-bitter-relationship-between-israels-benjamin-netanyahu-and-hamas

   youtu .be /xJO2wbrikn8

   timesofisrael .com /for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

   thenation .com /article /world /why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/

   “The current episode has been a long time in the making.”

   Yes, a long time of Palestinian occupation and repression, with a recent uptick in West Bank settler violence against Palestinians (assisted by the IDF).

   “And [Hamas has] found out what happens when you f@ck around.”

   Those who have studied terrorism point out that often one of the aims of terrorism has often been to provoke the other side into disproportionate response, and thus consolidate opposition to that other side. This is what Biden warned Israel against with his reference to 9/11, and the trap that Netanyahu walked right into (to keep his coalition alive and to stay out of jail).

   (continued…)

7. 1 day ago on Clay Jones

   “Trkump” — Sorry, just a typo, not an attempt at a clever nickname.

8. 1 day ago on Clay Jones

   I seem to recall that Cohen was involved in some hanky-panky about taxi licenses before working for Trkump.

9. 1 day ago on Rob Rogers

   Sorry, it seems to me that referring to “the current episode” ignores the fact that Palestinians have been second-class citizens inside Israel, and occupied people in Gaza and the West Bank, for decades. Both Israel and the Palestinians have been ingenious is proposing “solutions” that they knew would contain parts unacceptable to the other side. Israel has been “settling” Palestinian territory for a long time, and this has been ratcheting up lately, with the assistance of the IDF. “The current episode” has been a long time in the making.

   The Hamas “elected government” of Gaza hasn’t held elections since winning some long time ago, and has been propped up, as a counterforce to the PA by Netanyahu’s government. Israel is, at least on paper, a democracy, and more responsible for its actions than Palestinians in general are responsible for Hamas’s.

   So, would you say that Nat Turner and his troops "started’ the race war that resulted in tens of White deaths and more than a hundred Black ones? After all, there was peace (and slavery) up til then. . .

10. 2 days ago on Rob Rogers

    Sorry, I don’t understand your reply at all. It’s not a question of whether Black slaves were using “civilians as cover”; my question, which you did not address, was about when a conflict “started.”