Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

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How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.

Makes the MAGA military look incompetent. The US has a history of botched wars around the globe, most of which have little to do with Israel. If I'm drawing from data, then the Iran conflict is consistent with the post-war military movements of the US.

Now that the communists are no more, Israel is the next best scapegoat. The way I see it, Israel's current leaders are happy to be scapegoats because the war benefits Ben Gvir and a radicalized Likud. It allows them to consolidate domestic power and pursue aggressive foreign objectives under shadow of the Iran conflict.

I hope Netanyahu has thought this through. He has burned through 100 years of western guilt in the span of 3 years. To break even, Israel's military excursions must secure outsized outcomes, to the tune of decades of security. Because, I believe we are entering a couple of decades of bipartisan & unprecedented* anti-semitism.

* Figuratively speaking. Historically ofc, anti-semitism is pretty precedented.

> How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.

You don’t need to influence a nation, you only need to get one guy on board.

When you have ready access to the ego-driven and cognitively limited man in charge, either directly or through his sycophants, and that man has enormous executive authority to do mostly whatever he wants, this becomes very straightforward.

Israel has been looking for a sucker in the White House for 40 years, and they finally found one.

+1 I totally agree with this take.

Israel obviously influenced American politicians through many avenues, not the least of which is the Epstein blackmail ring.

Right. That"s why Epstein wired millions of dollars to Russia, had a Russian bodyguard, gave away his estate to some Belorussian woman, and so on. Obviously, Mossad at work here!

The US is currently waging a proxy war against Russia where they've managed to engineer something like 1,000,000 Russian casualties according to credible estimates [0]. Although obviously they're doing that for moral reasons since Russia launched an unprovoked war to maintain a sphere of influence around their borders which serious people in the US establishment have explained no country should be allowed to do.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the US has launched an unprovoked war on Iran because the Iranians were threatening the Israeli (and US for that matter) sphere of influence over the region, which obviously they are entitled to because god said so. The US is being entirely reasonable here and all serious people in the US establishment support or at most disagree with whether the mad scheme is a good idea.

Just saying, if the Russians are the ones who are running the influence operations in Washington they really should consider ... I dunno, sending younger girls, or whatever. Their money is doing unusually poorly for lobbying efforts.

And I want to add I don't even mind the hypocrisy or the evil all that much, I just wish I could find someone with a serious argument for how provoking the Russians makes long-term strategic sense. These policies are stupid, liable to get someone nuked sooner or later and just setting China up to have an easy time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

Please don't give credit for current Ukrainian advances to the Trumpenreich. The US intelligence apparatus was apparently even sharing NATO intelligence and information with Russia on Ukrainian positions. Once the EU excluded the US completely from this, Ukraine has made much more progress recently.

Epstein was irate that he suffered consequences others didn't (I'm not saying he didn't do more than others). He was thoroughly red-pilling and making comments more about how he believed what he did should be okay.

And being so irate about such things, it's not unreasonable to think "Fuck my handlers (whoever they are, if they exist, Mossad or otherwise), they didn't protect me, so screw it".

Occam's razor and such, but it's also entirely possible that he could have been being blackmailed by the Russians while "working for" Israel - or for that matter, vice versa.

Oh come on. Israel and US have been allies for 80 years. Not everything is about Jeffrey Epstein.

Ah yes, the nation's most influential sex-trafficker/pimp was a Mossad asset and the $100b budget CIA knew anything about it. They set up the world's most advanced domestic spying system, and the NSA did not flag anything.

You do realize that such conspiracy theories require all 3 of these things to be true ?

1. American elites are totally clueless

2. The CIA is hopelessly incompetent

3. Mossad has compromised every layer of the American military and elite civilian life

Israel obviously has a ton of influence on American elites and politicians. Just the AIPAC donations and the strong representation of Jews in American elite life is proof enough. You don't have to look much further.

It's the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories (often peddled as fact) that me think there is a certain hysteria going on. It's not anti-semitism per se. More so that otherwise respectable people lose all discernment towards unsubstantiated claims when those claims support their biases about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Epstein represented the Rothschilds: https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02470755?email=EFTA02470755-1

The Rothschilds have supported Israel for over 140 years; the most recent example is Lord Jacob Rothschild, who appears in the Epstein files.

Those are the facts. I don’t think it necessarily follows that the CIA didn’t realize what was going on or that the American elite were clueless. Those are left as an exercise to the reader.

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