thisislife2

Was this a normal body massage, where they also worked on your stomach or specifically a massage for the stomach promising a cure for your specific issues?

They have lost depending on the parameters you use to judge the war - I see 20% of Ukraine territory occupied by the Russia, Ukraine having no real military capability to launch an effective counter-offensive (due to lack of manpower), 75% of their industrial infrastructure is destroyed or lost to occupation. They are only surviving and fighting based on the charity of the EU. And their only hope of victory is based on the fantasy that EU is selling them - that once Russian economy collapses, they will "surrender". Even if an economic collapse were to happen in Russia (ala of USSR level), which I don't see happening, Russia will absolutely not end the war in any manner unless their military goals are achieved. Ukraine in NATO means NATO nuclear missile will easily be able to reach Moscow within minutes. Zelensky is a fool to keep ordering strikes deep inside Russia because every successful strike (with unsophisticated drones and ordinary missiles) inside Russia makes the Russians realise how militarily vulnerable they will be Ukraine were to join NATO, and so they will do everything to prevent that. (And let's not forget that Russia is a nuclear power - Ukraine cannot militarily win this war until NATO joins it).

What is clear that you have no understanding of either superpower politics, military capabilities or how economies work. You are clearly one of those shameless EU cheerleaders who don't care about Ukrainians getting slaughtered and their country destroyed, as long as they "weaken" Russia in the process.

That Gaza, the world's largest open prison, is an experiment playground for Israeli surveillance and military tech is a popular theory online that is now finding space in mainstream media too:

1. Gaza: a testing ground for Israeli military technology - https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-testing-ground-is...

2. Gaza “laboratory” boosts profits of Israel’s war industry - https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boost...

3. Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots - https://archive.is/P6mAQ

Apparently this is the source - https://dailydot.com/indeed-informing-employers-job-search - I'll leave it to the mods to decide which link to use.

> All depends on your victory conditions, tovarish.

The break with factual reality in your post is enlightening. As is the misinformation of Russia "running out of men" when that is the situation Ukraine is facing. There is no "victory", is the point. There is no path to defeating Russia without a nuclear war. That Ukraine can bring about the economic collapse of Russia is a delusional fantasy.

Some of us are aware about this. You'll still be surprised how many still promote similar kind of drugs as a "cure" online (here and elsewhere on other social media networks) for depression and anxiety.

> "Hundreds of Israelis were likely killed by Israel itself in “Hannibal” targeting incidents as well as unintentional crossfire." - This is wrong, and also propaganda. Why would they do this?

Propaganda can be factual and based on truth too. Isn't everything in that statement factual? The Hannibal Directive specifically authorises the IDF to kill its own citizens. Multiple sources confirm the order was given. And EI doesn't claim that all of the dead civilians were killed only due to the Hannibal Directive, but also because of "unintentional crossfire" (i.e. collateral damage). This is also true and confirmed by multiple sources. Moreover, Israel was totally unprepared for the attacks and its response was poor and chaotic - Israel's own media has extensively reported on this and EI cites them (it has even provided English translation of those articles). In fact, Israel's own media accuses the Netanyahu government of deliberately not releasing the report on the intelligence failures leading to Oct 7 massacre and data on how many Israeli citizens (soldiers and civilians) were killed by the IDF, deliberately or unintentionally, as he faces an election and doesn't want the failures of Oct 7 to be an election issue.

We don't know each other, and communicating this way is hard because the lack of non-verbal cues make it easy to misunderstand each other. I understand your concern about political biases of the media that I have cited. I am aware of their biases too - I read both left- and right- leaning medias. And, as you suggest, I don't blindly believe everything I read and judge them on how logical and verifiable they are. The EI article I cited has many references, from reputable sources, that back up their assertions (so I find it credible and believe their claim that they spent over a year investigating it). The WSWS article also cites Israel's media. JPost is an Israeli media outlet.

The real tragedy is that intelligent people like you buy the EU propaganda that "Ukraine is winning this war" without truly understanding what is happening on the ground.

The stark facts are simple - nearly 20% of Ukranian territory has been strategically captured by the Russians. Ukraine has no real chance of getting it back. Ukraine's counter-offensive has failed twice. It cannot launch any more counter-offensive because it doesn't have the men - any counter-offensive by recalling men from other parts of the frontline would weaken the defence line. So any new counter offensive launched needs to really bloody the Russians to completely back off, or the whole frontline will collapse and Ukraine will face a complete military defeat. Whatever Russian territory Ukraine had occupied has been recovered by the Russians. In case Ukraine doesn't accede to Russian terms, Russia has also been working on a plan B that entails systematically destroying Ukraine's industrial infrastructure (demilitarisation through de-industrialisation - https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/94244 ).

All Ukraine does now is to launch drones and missile attacks at Russian infrastructure for western and social media PR (as it is the only way EU will keep funding Zelensky's government and the war), while it is forced to retreat in the frontlines every week as the Russians slowly keep advancing.

Easy repairability is good too. (I was going by their own "Specifications" that said battery is "non-removable" - https://archive.md/Ngoxu ). I would buy this phone if my banking app is able to run on it.

Weird that the keyboard is removable but the battery isn't. Such a missed opportunity to make it more appealing to those who care about repairability.

> The use of such “Hannibal” strikes are confirmed in a UN report published in June. - Fire from Israeli helicopters, drones, tanks and even ground troops was deliberately undertaken in order to prevent Palestinian fighters from taking live Israeli captives who could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

> The HRC report does not say this: "227. The Commission verified information indicating that, in at least two other cases, Israeli Security Forces counter-offensive actions resulted in harm to and the killing of Israeli civilians and, in one of the cases, the actions were undertaken with clear knowledge of this risk. According to the Commission’s investigation, in these two cases at least 14 Israeli civilians were likely killed as a result of Israeli Security Forces fire: one woman was killed by helicopter fire while being taken from kibbutz Nir Oz to Gaza by militants78 and the other 13 were likely killed by tank shelling and crossfire in kibbutz Be’eri."

Really? What's the factual difference between the two statements? What EI wrote is a terse summary from the report confirming the fact that the IDF killed its own civilians. Other evidence, including from Israel's own Defence Minister confirms that the IDF were told to execute the Hannibal Directive (which is an order to kill their own people). There's no stretch in relating the two.

"The US does not negotiate with terrorists" doesn't mean that they also prioritise killing their own soldiers or citizens, as the first line of defensive or offensive tactics.

And your attempts to paint me as some left-based extremist / conspiracist, due to the sources cited, is both ludicrous and laughable. I am an Indian, and Gandhi politically united us Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs etc by teaching us to recognise the extremists / religious fundamentalists amongst us, who only political thrive in fostering hatred, enmity and violence between communities. That is why we remain a secular nation. And aren't a communist nation too (as we understand that extremist left- leaders seeks to divide people by class - a different identity politics at play).

Left- or right- doesn't matter, and each have a constructive role to play - the trick is to keep extremism at bay.

Thus, I don't see Israeli Jews committing genocide against Palestinians or the Lebanese. What I see is the depravity of Israeli right-wing Jewish religious fundamentalists relishing in the blood-lust of slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese women, children and the old simply because they are Arab Muslims and Christians, who refuse to leave the land where they were born. We ordinary human beings are not capable of such depravity, only the extremists are. Hitler did the same too - while the west has white-washed it, the Nazis where driven as much by Christian fundamentalism (as they were by the Eugenics) in creating the "us vs them" political narration of hate and violence. Netanyahu's politics is not so different from Hitler's or the Nazis today.

And just as Hitler's perverted Christian Nazism has nothing to do with Christianity as practiced by the ordinary Christians, Netanyahu's own perverted fundamentalist version of Jewish Fascism has nothing to do with Judaism of the ordinary Jews. Netanyahu's Jewish religious fundamentalism that drives the Israeli-right and the Islamic fundamentalism that drives the Palestinian-right are two faces of the same coin. Get rid of both, and the politics of hatred and violence in the region have a real chance to end.

True. As far as EU BigPowers are concerned, they know Ukraine has lost the war but don't really care if Ukraine is being destroyed and Ukranians are dying, as long as they kill as many Russians too.

Bureaucracy. I met an army officer once in a Corporation (government) office. Both of us were there to get the same paperwork done, but the army officer also needed his address revised (the corporation had issued a new number for his house). When we received our new documents, his document still showed the old address. He went to the bureaucrat who had processed it and asked why the address wasn't updated even though he had specifically requested that it be done. After some "consultation" with her co-workers, and a senior on her phone, she honestly blurted out - Sir, we don't know how to do that. It's some other department. I will have to consult my senior officer in that department and find out. Can you come back later?. As he shared his frustration he told me that civil bureaucrats needed to be trained like army officers. Army officers, he explained, were trained in multiple-disciplines because during a war they can't stop to search for the "right" person to do some task. Everyone in the field needed to sometimes improvise and be ready to take over someone else's task. Civil bureaucrats on the other hand are trained in a single discipline, tended to defend their specialisation, and thus get totally stumped when facing something outside their training.

It was an interesting insight: While department hierarchy must be respected, it shouldn't be organisationally rigid to prevent inter-departmental, inter-disciplinary learning. Lower ranking sub-units should also be given more freedom to make independent decisions.

If we could have unfiltered access to what everyone was thinking, I don't think any relationship would ever survive. Everyone in a relationship knows that the same person can induce feelings of love, anger, passion, hate, disgust, contempt, joy, doubt, affection etc over a period of time. Commitment to a relationship means learning to look beyond a particular moment of any particular feelings.

The Hannibal Directive - the IDF's infamous "murder-suicide" pact, where in Israel's polity can take a decision to sacrifice their own civilians and soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage by their enemies. In fact, it is now slowly being revealed that many of the so-called Hamas "savagery" that were hyped up by Israel and the western media about the killed civilians and soldiers were actually the result of Netanyahu government ordering the IDF to shoot, bomb and kill their own people and due to orders to disregard Israeli lives when attacking the Hamas militia:

- Israel expanded the use of its murderous “Hannibal Directive” – designed to prevent soldiers from being taken alive as prisoners of war – by killing many of its own civilians.

- The use of such “Hannibal” strikes are confirmed in a UN report published in June. - Fire from Israeli helicopters, drones, tanks and even ground troops was deliberately undertaken in order to prevent Palestinian fighters from taking live Israeli captives who could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

- At the initiative of the local Gaza Division, “Hannibal” was carried out right away: less than an hour after the Palestinian offensive began. “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza,” the division was ordered at 11:22 am.

- By midday, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military (the so-called “Pit” headquarters, deep under Israel’s Hakirya building in downtown Tel Aviv) to invoke the Hannibal Directive throughout the entire region, “even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves.”

- Israel has been engaged in an aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people.

- “Every day in captivity was very hard,” one former detainee said at the angry meeting. “I was in a house when there were bombardments all around. We were sitting in tunnels and we were very afraid that, not Hamas, but Israel would kill us, and then they’ll say: ‘Hamas killed you.’” Another released detainee said: “The fact is that I was in a hideaway that was bombed, and we had to be smuggled away, and we were injured. Not to mention that we were shot at by a helicopter when we were on our way to Gaza … You are bombing the tunnel routes exactly in the area where they [the other captives] are.”

Think about the irony in that - Hamas wanted to keep, and did more, to keep the Israeli hostages alive than their own government or the IDF! (This is what happens when wacko religious fundamentalists run a country).

Sources:

1. How Israel killed its own people on October 7 - https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-killed-hun...

2. IDF carried out Hannibal Directive, new 'Sword of Damocles' operation on October 7 - https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-84400...

3. Israel’s use of Hannibal Directive led to many deaths on October 7, including Israeli civilians - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/10/pqkz-j10.html

If you only have Rs. 100 in your pocket, you will think hard before spending Rs. 10. If you have Rs. 1000 in your pocket, you will not mind spending Rs. 10. That said, even if you are financially sound, why in the world would you want to pay $14k extra for a similar service that is available cheaper? That money could be better utilised elsewhere.

Sounds like an Indian wedding ... upper-middle class indians now spend around Rs. 50 lakhs (around USD 55,555) for a wedding here in South India.

You mean a Prime Minister, right? The President only came to the aid of the idiot ally who keeps opening multiple-fronts to a war just so that he can hold on to power and not go to jail, even as he keeps committing domicide and genocide of innocents.

> “Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements,” a US source told Axios. The vice president specifically challenged Netanyahu’s pre-war assertion that the Iranian regime would “fall swiftly” once military operations began and that a “popular uprising leading to regime change in Tehran” would follow the initial strikes. Twenty-eight days into the conflict, no such uprising has materialized.

The west believes "Data is the new oil". The west can't compete with China or India in the amount of data their citizens can generate because they are the world's most populous country. China already has a huge head start because it has already been collecting and data-mining its citizen's data. Attempts to make stronger privacy laws and sovereign data laws in many western countries will also impede data collections. But state sharing of data - through 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes and 14 Eyes - along with BigTech data could give the west an edge. (The west already has partial access to indian data because it leaks through lax data privacy laws, ill-thought indian government policies and BigTech. But Chinese data is truly firewalled.)

So yes, you are right that we will see our democracies embrace more and more control over us citizens, limiting our rights, while our governments emulate China. This is unfortunately because the west believes that being a leader in technology is essential to retain its powers.

Do you lock your house or car and permanently handover the keys to some stranger, who you then have to depend on always to lock or unlock it for you?

What you say is insightful and true. The west, America in particular, has a genuine problem today with its politics of polarising people to extremes. It partly has to do with how politics is done online in the internet, through the creation of "echo chambers" where no "dissent" is tolerated.

While there are reports that Iran has been charging a toll on some ships from "hostile" countries, there is no such report suggesting that the French, Japanese and Omani ships cited in this news report did so too.

In this particular case, it is a diplomatic and reciprocal gesture of goodwill from Iran - the French have publicly said that joint military operations to open the Strait is a bad a idea and diplomatic options need to be pursued for the same while the Japanese have confirmed that they won't be sending any minesweepers to the Strait (Japan Isn’t Sending Minesweepers to Middle East, Takaichi Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-12/japan-isn... ). Oman, of course, has been the mediator in the early US-Iran negotiations, and has publicly said Iran cannot be blamed for the US-Israel attacks ('This war is not of their making,' Omani foreign minister says of Iran - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-not-their-making-oman... ) as it had accepted a new nuclear deal with the Trump administration during the negotiations (Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-... ). He has blamed the Trump administration for undermining negotiations and implied that they acted in bad faith.

Contrary to popular belief, Iran's most important arms supplier has been China, and not Russia, in the last decade. To preserve its ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia, Russia has sometimes compromised arm shipments to Iran. Historically too, Russia has worked with France and Britain to undermine Iran, through the Shah.

You are being downvoted for stating the truth - you are absolutely right that the Democrats too would have fully supported Israel's attack on Iran. Let us not forget that Biden played a major role in Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza (and now in West bank) by helping the IDF spread its propaganda hoax that "Hamas beheaded babies", in the western media (Biden lied that he had personally seen the "horrific pictures " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_baby_beheading_hoax ). Of course, unlike Trump, a Democratic party administration would have resorted to hypocrisy and propaganda that the war was for "democracy", "human rights", "save jews", "fight terrorism" etc. etc. But it would have been much shorter - they would have killed the Iranians leaders too, and struck military targets and then stopped.

How is this any different from betting on when Israel or America would invade Iran? Wouldn't Iranians be dying in an invasion?

It isn't just about monopoly or unfair competition. This can also be covered under consumer rights - the Right to Repair. No OS provider should be allowed to dictate what software you can or not run on your own device and / or OS you have paid for.

AV1 may also have patent issues - AV1’s open, royalty-free promise in question as Dolby sues Snapchat over codec - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

I've read that NATO radars in Turkey were equally important to provide early warning to Israel. It's not far-fetched to assume that US radars in the middle-east did too. US THAAD in Israel would definitely be networked into those.

They can afford to. People are forgetting that unlike Russia, the US isn't in a wartime economy mode. Iran isn't a threat to world's most powerful military. And it's not as if Iran is suddenly going to launch a ground invasion against all its neighbours (which would be disaster for it). It too is seeking a stalemate end to the war. Iran's military has been crippled. The only problem is that as the Trump administration has declared victory, it's still trying to figure out what that "victory" is. And how to deal with Netanyahu's self-destructive tantrum that dragged the US into this mess in the first place.