They are tracked by US spy planes

Sorry to be cynical but the US didn’t exactly get its ass handed to it. They lacked the political will to subjugate Afghanistan and Iraq, which would not be the case if they considered it necessary to their survival. And they annihilated the conventional forces of both countries in an incredibly short time. Israel is crossing all kinds of red lines while everyone seems to assume the momentum will somehow change. I don’t think we should imagine that the amount of violence they would need to impose to achieve their ends makes those ends impossible.

Israel has claimed there were 300 people there. That might be untrue but we know it was a high level meeting so other leaders would undoubtedly have been killed

Whatever bullshit you hear in the next few days from the US about trying to negotiate a ceasefire, remember that they just gifted the IDF another 8 billion dollars to subsidise their wars and genocide

But the whole point of their missiles was specifically to stop this situation from occurring, ie Israel bombing with impunity.

Israel has been bombing all over the border not just Beirut

Perhaps. It seems that Israel might not have taken this move if they weren’t certain that such a retaliation wasn’t possible. Certainly restraint based on the logic of mutually assured destruction doesn’t make sense for Hezbollah going forward. So I guess we’ll see in the next few days.

But i mean - in all seriousness - why aren’t there a hundred missiles on their way to Tel Aviv right now then?

The pager attack and now getting their leadership taken out - Hezbollah must be heavily compromised. And that means those Israeli air strikes probably have been hitting weapons stockpiles. Meanwhile Iran has shown it’s not willing to escalate under any circumstances. A very bad situation.

I think he’s probably alive. By announcing his death Israel will try to track Hezbollah’s internal communications back to him. If he is dead then Hezbollah must be so compromised by Israeli intelligence that they are basically fucked anyway, which is also possible.

Hezbollah’s aim is to fight a defensive war against Israel. Israel’s aim is to create a wider conflict that draws in the US. Technically Hezbollah has much stronger offensive capabilities than it’s shown, but if it starts dropping missiles on Tel Aviv the US will come in and turn Lebanon into another Libya

All the people you mention as being against drug use make their money/employment from prohibition.

The public generally opposes legalisation because they rightly see that drug addiction causes enormous harms, and they want to keep that away from their children and communities. But there is a kind of vicious circle here in that the harms of addiction, and indeed addiction itself, is largely driven by prohibition. Example: compare legal methadone with illegal heroin (the former is not culturally desirable, and those who adhere to a methadone program are often healthy enough and successfully quit using, etc. Likewise the methadone program is not a driver of organised and petty crime).
‘Lighter’ drugs like LSD are victims of cultural puritanism and decades of drug war propaganda. A hangover of Victorian era morality.

To some extent the drug war was designed to criminalise minorities and the counter culture. In any case, drug prohibition was allowed to expand whereas other prohibitions (gambling, alcohol, sex etc) were wound back because it primarily affected those outside mainstream white culture. Of course that’s no longer the case, which is probably why it’s slowly starting to be wound back now.

There is also less political will behind drug legalisation because there is no power behind it - drug addicts can’t organise, and any kind of drug legalisation that aimed to minimise harm would have to forego a profit motive. So it just lingers on as a problem whereas other social issues that don’t directly antagonise capitalist economics make progress.

Most Soc-Dems are people who were born into the top 10% of wealth in their society rather than the top 1%, and it’s their bitterness about that which drives them. This squabbling among the upper classes has been the great conflict of Western politics since before the French Revolution (the original lines being the aristocracy vs the emerging power of the bourgeoisie). These people don’t even know what imperialism is, at least not as we understand it - and the welfare state is only a sort of part charity part bribe to placate the working class, rather than the product of a belief in equality. To us it looks it like European soc-Dems are resigned to being US pawns, but a lot of them are genuinely in love with the idea of America, as all liberals are.

‘I am large, I contain multitudes’

• moo deng

when I was young we had to stay awake on drugs for days to simulate schizophrenia, kids nowdays don’t know how lucky they are

https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/amp/
It seems the offer was to return civilian rather than all hostages

A deal with the resistance would necessitate movement towards an acceptable long term resolution for both sides re Gaza. I don’t think the assumption that Hamas and Hezbollah lured Israel into war, or would desire a future war, is correct. I suspect Hamas did not expect the incursions on Oct 7th to be as successful as they were, nor the Israeli response - which began with them shelling their own citizens - to be so extreme. They offered to return all hostages immediately in return for Israeli agreeing not to launch a ground invasion, for example. Oct 7 also only occurred within the context of Israel having taken years of attempts at peaceful resistance and resolution on the part of Hamas as a sign of weakness to be exploited. Ultimately the US has calculated that keeping Israel happy is worth any cost, whether that’s because of their importance to US imperialism or for domestic political reasons is not totally clear I think.

The US could stop all of this anytime they want. Just as WW1 was allowed to start because Austria knew that whatever dumb fuck move they made Germany would back them, Israel assumes it can act with impunity because the US stands behind them. Literally all that Biden would have to do, all that Harris would have to suggest, is that the US move from unconditional to conditional support. ‘You guys can commit genocide if you want and we won’t stop you, but we won’t subsidise it either and if it leads to a larger war you’re on your own.’ If that message was seriously given Israel would chill tf out faster than any country in history has. In that sense the US and the Dem’s are just as responsible for this genocide and the oncoming war as Israel is.

I think the 15 years thing is probably just a cover story tbh

Hezbollah wont initiate a war, that would be totally counter to their strategy. Israel probably will because the economic and internal political pressure is untenable long term. The question is how will the US and how will Muslim countries likeYemen and Iran respond.