DL Open Thread Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024
Israel has let slip its dogs of war with a military invasion of Lebanon. If the idea is to wipe out Hezbollah, well, it didn’t work last time, it almost certainly won’t work this time, and it won’t work next time they try it, either. Biden was willing to get us out of Afghanistan. Why won’t he pump the brakes on this murderous partnership?
A judge in Georgia, Robert McBurney, struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban. Noting that many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks, McBurney wrote,
When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene.
For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
It’s good to have jurists who’ve read the classics.
East Coast dock workers, as expected, went on strike at midnight yesterday. Higher wages are the headline ask, but the sticking point appears to be the union’s demand to ban automation in a field that’s automating rapidly in the rest of the world. If this tactic worked throughout history, all our sweaters would still be woven by hand.
Pete Rose, baseball’s boorish all-time hit king, was found dead in his Las Vegas home. I didn’t realize he lived there, but it’s a logical place for a guy who was banned for life for gambling to sell his memorabilia. Who’s more likely to overlook your vice than a bunch of guys who share it?
The floor’s yours.
I loved Pete Rose and he was flawed like me. You are right about guys forgave him because they did the same activities. Hypocrisy is not my thing but I still think he should have been forgiven. Look at Trump what he got away with and he was President, flaws and all. God bless America and Pete Rose too.
He was a stone-cold asshole for a lot of reasons beyond his gambling. “Boorish” was me being polite.
It is disingenuous to say Israel has “invaded Lebanon.” It would be more accurate to say Israel is attacking Hezbollah in south Lebanon.
Hezbollah controls south Lebanon with the uneasy assent of the actual elected government, which has been relegated to the North. It’s sort of as if some US militia group took over, say, the US Northwest, and ignored Federal control (while still not seceding).
If the West wants to help, they can assist the elected government of Lebanon to expel Hezbollah from its borders.
Anti-Israel westerners would like to lazily cut-and-paste their Gaza slogans to apply to Lebanon. But south Lebanon/Hezbollah is a totally different can of worms.
Hezbollah is the crown jewel in Iran’s stable of terrorist proxies, which also includes Hamas and the Houthis. This allows Iran to conduct a war against Israel but with Palestinians having the dying and destruction. Which bolster the far-right religious regime in Iran.
Netanyahu seems to have some clue that degrading Hezbollah power will destabilize and possibly topple the regime in Iran. Not saying he is correct, but seems like a worthy objective, and I’ll put Israel’s knowledge of Iran internal politics over mine.
It is disingenuous to pretend that sending your soldiers into another country isn’t an invasion.
To play Ellie’s game, if we sent US soldiers into Mexico to confront the drug cartels, would that or would that not be characterized as an invasion? Not by us, sure, but it would be by Mexico.
Pretending Lebanon is a single sovereign country is what I find disingenuous. “Lebanon” doesn’t control or defend its southern precincts – Hezbollah does.
Thanks to Iran (and open ports of entry), Hezbollah has a much larger military force than the Lebanese government.
Heczbollah ATTACKED Israel on October 8th. If a terrorist group had initiated hostilities toward us by lobbing rockets, say, New England from Canada and we had to evacuate a large swath of our north to keep America safe, wouldn’t we have tried to take out the terrorist so our citizens could safely return to their homes? WHY IS ISRAEL ALWAYS SEEN AS “THE AGGRESSOR WHEN THEY RESPOND TO ATTACKS INITIATED BY OTHERS????
Because of how they respond. There are a lot of ways to respond. They choose methods so disproportionate that they lose all sympathy on the world stage.
I’m sorry I had to explain what is blindingly obvious to most others.