This situation is sad and ironic.

The area known as Judea was renamed Palestine during the time of Roman emperor Hadrian.
The residents of Judea/Palestine were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity around 400 ad by the Romans, and later in the 700's ad were forced to convert to Islam.
They never left. They just changed religions. The children of the Jews of the new testament, are the Palestinians of today (now practicing Islam).

Many years passed, the Eastern Roman empire resided over much of the area, ruled out of Turkey, and the region was more or less all-right. Along the way it changed names to the Ottoman empire.

After WW1, the Ottoman empire shrank dramatically, and renamed itself to simply Turkey. However it still held some lands that were not actually Turkish (eg. ~Syria), and was still a mini-empire.
Around this general time period, Palestine became a British colony.

During WW2, there were many displaced Europeans of Jewish faith that had nowhere to go.
(*Britain didn't want them either, most places didn't. Anti-Semitism was rather common at the time. Even the Nazi eugenics policy wasn't much criticized at the time. re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critics. Actually, the Nazi's strong association with anti-semitism + all the anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, helped cure a lot of anti-semitism in Europe.).
In the late 1940's Britain split occupied Palestine into smaller-Palestine+Israel, and assisted in relocating WW2 displaced Europeans of Jewish faith to Israel. Which at face value made sense, because "the bible says Jews are from Judea". However the area from which was established Israel was more or less ~devoid of followers of the Jewish faith in the 1940's.
And that's the irony! The British creation of Israel involved taking land from Palestinians (i.e. The children of the original Jews of Judea), and giving it to Europeans of Jewish faith (foreign immigrants).

That then resulted in middle-eastern resentment and backlash over western invasion/occupation/seisure-of-land. This resentment against immigrating European Jews caused 'Jews at large' to be discriminated against throughout the middle-east, and that in turn led to a migration wave of regional-Jews from the surrounding areas into Israel.
This resulted in a concentration of Jewish-faithed immigrants of European and middle-eastern ethnicity, all in Israel - further displacing the original residents.

Basically, in the end, the original people of Judea were kicked out of their homes and their lands given to immigrants... and they really resent it. While in the mean time the immigrants acclaim to have a god given right to be there because there is some old paper that says that people of their faith are from the area.

Ta-da.

Britain could have just sent Europeans of Jewish faith to Palestine, and made it an integrated nation.
But nope, they had to displace people and create a bunch more problems.
Gee, thanks Britain.
I pretty much face-palm when I hear "this conflict is thousands of years old" (when it's only been ~66 years).


Note :
I make the distinction between ethnically Jewish and religiously Jewish.
I use the phrase "Europeans of Jewish faith" to clarify that these were displaced Europeans, who may have had an ancestor or two way way way up the family tree that was from Judea - but were otherwise European and of Jewish faith - who may have lived in an area with little mingling with outsiders, and hence a visually distinct appearance (i.e. what made it possible to make visual caricatures of their people, such as : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_%281940_film%29)
You can also play semantics with "what is ethnically Jewish, when the ethnicity is labelled after the faith", etc.

There's also the geopolitical aspect. Israel is the only "Western" nation in the middle-east. Given that the area is globally significant in terms of resources, that makes Israel a critically important ally. So the rhetoric will always lean.

Personally, I wonder if the things that European Jews suffered during WW2, didn't create some mental/emotional baggage that today plays itself out with how they treat Palestinians. Sort of a "I don't care about your suffering, because I've been through worse" kind of situation.

However, I understand how Israel does not want an open integrated society with Palestinians. The Jewish population is rather small, and in an integrated society they would be such a small proportion that they would essentially be bred out of existence within a few generations. For those who wish to preserve their culture, that's 'kind of a big deal'.

-scheherazade

I think it's noble to do whatever little you can to oppose the brutal half-century long occupation, humiliation, starvation and assassination of your people, yes.

Israel is an illegal occupying power in international law, that's a fact. It constantly violates practically every obligation that occupation incurs in international law; it engages in collective punishment, it regularly seizes and destroys private property, it laughingly fails to provide for the safety and welfare of the population under its control, it settles occupied territory with its civilians, it forcibly relocates Palestinian civilians, it routinely ignores the UN's attempts to restrain these and other illegal behaviours, these are facts.

Israel is engaged in terrorism in Gaza and elsewhere, and has been for decades - fact.

I honestly don't know what you're referring to with regards to 'derision,' but i don't really care. Probably best for us to drop it since it now appears that you're turning to some rather irrelevant issues. The original point about the "border states" was not how to label or refer to them, but to show that Lincoln did not 'emancipate' or invade them, thereby showing his motivations had nothing to do with freeing the slaves.

I don't know who specifically 'shot first' but this is what happened:

"Ft. Sumter was located in the middle of the harbor of Charleston, SC where the U.S. forts garrison had withdrawn to avoid incidents with local militias in the streets of the city. Unlike Buchanan who allowed commanders to relinquish possession to avoid bloodshed, Lincoln required Maj. Anderson to hold on until fired upon. Jefferson Davis ordered the surrender of the fort. Anderson gave a conditional reply which the Confederate government rejected, and Davis ordered P. G. T. Beauregard to attack the fort before a relief expedition could arrive."

The Confederacy ordered an attack on a fort in what it saw as its territory and therefore under Union occupation. The Union saw it as their fort.
Again, a survey of the opinion of people you know about who 'started it' does not the same thing as that "most reasonable people" would see it like you do.

More irrelevant splitting of hairs: in the United Sates of 2014 practically no one openly advocates institutionalized slavery or openly argue their "right" to own slaves. So for practical purposes, (almost) everyone is openly against slavery.
That, in any case, is totally irrelevant to the Jon Stewart video and so your comments are far from relevant.

"I'm not going to comment on Jon Stewarts motives or morality, they are not germane to the subject I'm discussing."
It's all well and good that you're not going to comment on Stewart's motives or morality, but most of what you constitute your "arguments" are not germane to what I'm discussing here, or to any of my original points prior to your digressions and tangential discussions about which I frankly have little interest. No offense.

What the fuuuuuck.

History happens, good or bad, it happens. Stop talking about it like it's some pattern that repeats itself and for which can you decide a better outcome for it. It doesn't and you can't -- it just seems that way because we're only invested in the patterns that appeal most to our world view.

You see what you want and then you justify your world view by what you see.

God, who the fuck cares if Lincoln was good or bad, he's an icon. He was assassinated so he paid his dues. What does America represent? White occupation of native land or saving the world from the nazis? It represents freedom, even if it falls short of its own ideals. It's in your head. It always is. Go watch more Game of Thrones. (JK, but frealz yo.)

He also had a sweet beard.

And a sweet hat.

@Velocity5
i think i understand our difference.
you use the term as a descriptive noun.
i use artist as a verb.
it is a way of being,not a mere title of occupation.

yet both usages are correct.

There is no taboo in discussing the "rape worthy" contents of media portrayals when it comes to the depiction of women, but there remains consistent and pervasive taboos when it comes to its comparability with men (despite the fact that, statistically speaking, men are far more likely to be the victims of rape than a woman is).

The silence on the issue is deafening, especially when you take into account that as many as 20% of male military veterans are the victims of sexual assault and trauma. Where's the depiction of this alongside its concomitant "warrior" culture depictions throughout the media which in fact breeds the very aggression which perpetuates it?

<crickets>

Moreover, where is the cognizance of how the media perpetuates the stereotypes of men which lead to greater proportions of men committing suicide? Or becoming homeless? Or suffering from crippling occupational injuries? Or dying in the line of duty? Or being alienated from their children/families while still being fully expected and legally obligated to support them financially?

I'd go so far as to say your very denial of these facts only serves to further underscore how commonplace it is to cater to the oppression of women, while continuing to perpetuate the ongoing subjugation and oppression of men.

I'd say that there are at least three engineers and a conductor on the market for new underwear. If you have ever been on the rails when a train is bearing down on you, they look MUCH bigger than they do in passing.

It's possible that they screwed up the track occupancy clearance at the RTC level, but my guess is that one of those two ran a stop signal, and based on the fact that they are frantically backing up at the time, I suspect it's the CP freight. That's pretty much an automatic cardinal rules violation; there's a crew who will be looking for new jobs once the dust settles.

...Oh-and for FUCKSAKE get rid of the prison industry in America, educate and embrace the African American and Hispanic bulk of the occupants of the same (race war continues, in the form of safety for the "LAW ABIDING"), and pick a dead city to stuff all the goddamn gang-bangers in. There are some really great humans locked-away forever there who have something to contribute to society, but the prison is nothing but a training-ground for another generation of humans who will be used to justify totalitarian control, martial law, and the annihilation of all freedoms for all of humanity.

Escape form New York would be a wonderful scenario. Let Dick fucking Cheney and his types set-up their little summer-homes there along with their residences and bases of operation.

I don't want a police state unless it has limited borders full of all the hind-brain motherfuckers in it-The rest of us can live in peace and comfort.

Legalize all drugs at the same time, and let those with weak wills, off themselves into a stupor. They won't have to steal your little X-boxes and smartphones, your vehicles and TV's, to buy their drugs. Give em all they want. I'd rather trip-over junkies than have savages invade my domicile to buy crack.

I dunno if 'debunked' is the right channel. Specific incidents and atrocities in the film may have been debunked so I guess so. The overall picture though was completely correct, the Japanese occupation of the territories they invaded was absolutely horrific, and that is verified as entirely true.

I guess my fear is that it not be missed while pointing out the staged events in a video like this today's generation doesn't miss the fact that countless other atrocities absolutely and verifiably WERE committed by the Japanese occupations.

oh, *laws also.

I wish they had also covered the way different cultures have handled surnames:
Occupational names (Smith, Baker, etc)
Geographic/locational names (Ford, al-Tikriti, Yamamoto, etc)
Patronymic/Matroymic names (Olsen, McDonald, etc)

...and I'm sure there's others I'm unaware of.

Actually studies show this is pretty much how many girls respond. If you rate males on a scale of 1-10, guys who would normally otherwise score in the 3-4 range when only their face is shown score in the 7-8 range when their occupation and income are shown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoKA-a5vEEc

A disturbing idea for sure.

I know it's just a very visual illustration of how history might not change for the better if key elements are changed, but just to expand on his little thought experiment...

They wouldn't have had access to the neccessary raw material, would they? Pretty much every sort of metal alloy was in short supply even during the late '30s. The occupation of Narvik brought some relief, but still, a nuclear weapons program requires some pretty exotic material that you can't get at Tesco.

Perhaps I should've put this in the description... but Sabine Schmitz is (was?) a professional racing driver who has won the 24 hours Nürburgring endurance race twice (1996, 1997) and has completed more than 20,000 laps of the Norschleife (increasing at 1200 per year) in her occupation as "the fastest taxi driver in the world" (providing hot laps around the Norschleife). She also has a career as a tv presenter.

Ron Simons was also a racer in the 90s - http://www.gtspirit.com/2011/05/18/interview-ron-simons-rsr-nurburg-the-nurburgring/

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.

" What is it that we do that strikes them as funny?"

One of them is using wads of paper to wipe our asses...
Here's a few more...

Absence of topless beaches in the U.S.
Our often obsessive pre-occupation with germs and the west's plethoric use of "products" for grooming
Kissing anyone besides a lover on the mouth
Leaving home at 18 to "live on one's own" (unlike Americans, family units enjoy an enduring and innate cohesion-Most other cultures also have a healthy respect and prominent place for their seniors that the west has forgotten as well)
Halloween (the U.S. is the only country that celebrates this like Americans do)