this reflects a bias in the white house and longstanding reaganite policy to prop up arab crazies to fight the communists, who they see as trying to restrict their "religious freedom" and are therefore seen as reliable allies, but negates history and empirical reality on the ground.

remember that jared kushner said the administration doesn't think history matters, which is the most retarded thing i've ever heard.

the reality is that gaza has almost no history inside of the arab world, as it's been under turkish rule since the crusades and was a key part of the roman empire until the 7th century, at the latest. the region was periodically under some kind of arab occupation for a few centuries from about 700-1000 that ended over a thousand years ago. the gulf monarchies have had no control over this area for many centuries and really have no business trying to decide it's future.

the problem is that most decision makers in washington just don't know that; they think the region must be arab because it's muslim, which itself is even not really true. they're also propping up the arabs to keep the iranians out. unlike the arab peninsula, persia actually has a long history in gaza, and that's not going to work due to the geography, specifically the massive desert, which we should not forget is partly manmade from overfarming. the fact that the gulf monarchies have all of this money all of a sudden doesn't open up a royal road from the desert to damascus.

if you don't understand history, or don't care, or understand it poorly, you're likely to create the same mistakes over and over. 

at some point, the fact that recent attempts by monarchist gulf arabs to colonize the levant with radical versions of islam are the cause of most of the problems on the ground rather than the solution to the instability needs to be understood to get passed this. 

take solace in the realization that the oil is running out, the temperatures in the area are climbing to uninhabitable levels and the small area of the region that is fertile after millennia of desertification is falling into the sea. this attempt to make arabia great again won't last much longer. their towers will fall, and their cities will crumble. the people of the levant need to tough it out.

our society's reliance on oil will cause it to make bad decisions and align with bad actors. i've said many times that if you want much of this to end, you should start by boycotting, divesting and sanctioning the oil industry as best as you can.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-hosts-forum-in-qatar-on-international-gaza-force-with-turkey-reportedly-left-out/

The group is on a sponsored travel trip organized by a Canadian registered non-profit charity organization, the Canadian Muslim Vote.

that sentence describes a large amount of what is wrong with canada, right now.

why doesn't canada just become the eighth province of rhodesia?

introducing the new prime minister of canada.....

....lord milner!

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2214382/ottawa-approves-merger-of-teck-and-anglo-american

there are not more than two people in canada that want to suffer through jenny kwan's analysis of israel's settlement activity in historical judaea, and the canadian parliament has no jurisdiction over the region and can do nothing but play politics with the situation, which should be seen as unwelcome by both sides. it is not clear to me that anybody in palestine wants to talk to jenny kwan, and i wouldn't be surprised if she found nobody to talk to there. on that level, israel was correct to deny entry; these people were in the region solely to cause problems. they have no mandate, as canadian representatives, to comment on domestic issues in other countries; it's a performative behaviour directed at a subset of their voting coalition that has no relevance to their job description.

the recent history in canada is pretty clear: politicians that publicly side with palestine are constantly punished for it. don't be surprised if a majority of those six mps lose re-election as a consequence of this botched pr stunt, which has no valid purpose in the context of the canadian parliament. canadian voters are correct to ask why their representatives are flying around the world and meddling in foreign states instead of representing their constituents in canada.

that said, my understanding is that they would be surprised by what they found. the people that live in the west bank have deeper ties to israel than gazans do; a large percentage of them know their ancestors were hebrew and jews, and many families only converted to islam in recent memory, partly as a part of the arab revolt in world war two. gazans are less hebrew in ancestry, and have a lot of african slave admixture, due to the region being a part of egypt and being on the coast, where more slave trading happened during arab and ottomon occupation periods. that is the reason that so many gazans are dark-skinned; indigenous jews should be light-skinned to olive-skinned, but gaza is mostly african in ancestry, and so it is much darker than the west bank, israel proper, lebanon or syria. the violent resistance movement in gaza is almost entirely absent in the west bank, where many people see israeli annexation as a way out of exclusion and segregation, and are more interested in integration than "resistance". hamas is not popular in the west bank and the general position is that fighting the jews is stupid and self-defeating. they want jobs in israeli cities, they don't want more bombs and violence.

if you speak the language, you can converse with these people online, if you are interested in them in a non-professional capacity,  which should be the level of interest broadcast by the canadian mps. the west bank is not cut off from the world the way that iran is. if they were to talk to people over facebook, they might get a different perspective than what state-controlled media in the unfree dictatorships in the gulf countries are trying to manufacture.

they may have found that a surprising number of inhabitants in the west bank, which i will reiterate largely have hebrew ancestry, are actually in favour of annexation by israel. because how else can they improve their material conditions? bombing israel is stupid, and the west bank seems to have figured that out, while gaza is still struggling with it.

that would be utterly retarded and a giant step further into the backwards free market dystopia we've been suffering through since thatcher.

library books should be shipped entirely at taxpayers' costs, at no cost to the library at all, and it doesn't matter if canada post runs at a loss to do that. the problem in front of us is this utterly idiotic idea that canada post should be profitable. canada post should not be profitable, it *should* run at a loss; that is the reason we have a publicly owned post system, and why it was determined as a necessary government function in a working society several hundred years ago.

removing publicly owned mail delivery is a giant step on the road back to free market feudalism.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/12/15/ctv-national-news-will-canada-post-increase-rates-for-shipping-library-books/

in the not so distant past, the british intentionally used opium - manufactured in british india - as a weapon of mass destruction against the chinese, and it worked extremely well. it essentially destroyed the chinese revival after the mongols in it's tracks, leaving the chinese insular and unable to keep up with a changing world. the british just wanted hong kong as a trading colony; they almost got wiped out by the russians and japanese in succession.

the chinese have no doubt learned from this, and would have reason to weaponize opium, or synthetic opium, and use it against the british, which are now the americans, as a tactic of revenge. that actually makes sense.

but there's no real evidence of this. the chinese are exporting the precursor materials, but they're made for cleaning supplies, and the chinese export everything.

this is not in the realm of fantasy, but looking into the eyes of nicolas maduro and seeing a plot to dismantle america with addiction is not real, and the data's just not there.

assad was worth standing up for, as he was the only moderate in the area, and the alternative was the bloodthirsty islamic fascists that biden let walk into damascus. the venezuelan opposition is not so scary, and maduro is as big an asshole as they get.

trump's behaviour is illegal, and he should be called out for it, but you won't see me lift a carpal tunnel damaged pinkie to stand up for the dictator of venezuela. this guy is a doofus. bolivarianism died with chavez.