£250 this month, which was nice. Only my second or third win in 2 years. A long way to go before I catch up with my sister though – she nabbed one of the £25k prizes at the beginning of the year.

Well I wasn’t walking around in the middle of the largest ballistic missile attack in history, was I? I was in a secure shelter, as was pretty much everyone else in Israel.

You keep taking about “equivalence” when nobody else has. Is this “equivalence” in the room with you now, Ernie?

I’m sure that’s what Nasrallah thought too

obviously if Hamas has the possibility of targeting an IDF target or a civilian target they will go for the military one.

They killed 364 people dancing at a music festival. They machine gunned farm hands and families sheltering in Kibbutz safe rooms. They fire unguided rockets indiscriminately into Israel, including at me. And you’re talking about them obviously choosing military targets?

Character.

[Mod] we’re now closing this thread but it will be reopened tomorrow.

You clearly stated that the total Palestinian deaths when Hamas launched their attack had been, quote, 0

For ****’s sake Ernie. Read before you post. It’s embarrassing.

These are my exact words. You yourself quoted them.

Attempts to claim equivalence of 1195 Israeli deaths with tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths: 0

Dismissals of Palestinian, Lebanese, etc. deaths: 0

Dismissals of Israeli, migrant worker, tourist deaths: at least 3

Point to the bit where I “clearly stated” zero Palestinian deaths. I can see where I said “tens of thousands”. Help me out Ernie. Where did I say zero?

So you are not counting all the Palestinians who died before Oct 7? They count as 0?

I’m struggling to understand the mental hoops you must have jumped through to get that from even a single one of my posts here.

But you carry on with your nonsensical attempts to divert attention away from your crystal clear, tripled-down on feelings about non-Palestinian suffering. We can all read your words Ernie. We can all read mine. And I’m confident that whilst I’ll often come across as a prick, I’ve never been quite so off colour as you in this matter.

I am quite upset at the attempts to compare 1,200 dead Israelis with the 17,000 dead Palestinian children killed by the IDF since then btw.

Then the upset is entirely of your own doing.

Let’s have a thread tally:

Attempts to claim equivalence of 1195 Israeli deaths with tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths: 0

Dismissals of Palestinian, Lebanese, etc. deaths: 0

Dismissals of Israeli, migrant worker, tourist deaths: at least 3

Some might find that quite upsetting.

Well that is obviously untrue, because if was true you would be to copy and paste the bit where I dismissed the deaths and suffering of the Israelis at the start of this nightmare. But obviously you can’t.

Do you have short term memory loss? You’ve done exactly that 3 times in the last two pages:

the only civilian suffering is on the Palestinian side

That is a complete sentence, not open to interpretation. By using “only” you are excluding any non-Palestinian suffering, thereby dismissing it.

It is frankly beyond belief that anyone should challenge that claim.

Strawman. Nobody has challenged any claim that Palestinians are suffering. It’s the claim that only Palestinians are suffering you’re getting shit for.

It’s not even causing upset. We’ve been building up to it for 34 pages so it’s hardly a surprise. I just don’t think it should go unchallenged is all.

I’ll take the “sanctions” promised on page 1 if necessary. But if folk can go around freely dismissing dead partygoers and dead farm workers and families machine-gunned down while cowering in safe rooms, without reproach, then maybe the thread has run its course anyway.

I of course didn’t claim that no Israelis died on Oct 7

Where did I say that you did?

You made the same mistake as DrJ – nowhere did equivalence come into tonyf1’s post. You’ve inferred that yourself, and made a pretty telling statement as a result.

I don’t want the thread closed at all. I think it’s important people can come read people’s musings. Especially not particularly nice musings. It helps people judge character.

You seem to be a bit confused. What has happened is that people have responded to the deaths of 50,000 Gazans by saying “what about 1139 killed on October 7”.

Re-read. Ernie stated that the only civilian suffering has been on the Palestinian side – a) categorically false whichever way you look at it, and b) utterly devoid of compassion. When asked whether the (actually) 1195 who died in Israel on October 7th at the hands of Hamas counted as civilian suffering, he then doubled down on only Palestinian civilians having suffered, and explicitly stated that the innocent civilians who were murdered on October 7th don’t count.

You then peeped out from behind Ernie’s legs and clumsily tried to make the argument that tonyf1 was drawing equivalence, which for everyone who can read is evidently not the case: he was questioning why 1195 innocents should be so obviously and deliberately omitted from Ernie’s count of civilian suffering.

Doesn’t seem like much confusion on my part.

No slip of the pen. I think your opinion is disgusting.

obscene to attempt to draw some kind of equivalence between the people killed on October 7 (many of them killed by Israeli fire, btw) and the 50,000 killed directly by Israel in Gaza

It’s pretty much the textbook definition of whataboutism. “You can’t bring up x because y happened”. Retorting to an question over a pretty sick claim that the people who died in Israel last October 7th don’t count, don’t mean anything, are irrelevant.

many of them killed by Israeli fire, btw

Are you for real?

I mean, Ernie and DrJ are just “whatabouting” the deaths of 1139 innocents now. I’ve yet to see anyone so keen to display their complete lack of shits given about Palestinian, Lebanese, Druze, etc. deaths.

Tells a story about your characters I think.

So how does that remark fit in with Jewish newspapers/websites which are very clearly publicly announcing the intention of zionists to colonise Southern Lebanon ?

I’m sure British newspapers have over the years reported on the intentions of people like Tommy Robinson, Enoch Powell, Oswald Moseley, etc. and even interviewed some of their supporters/photographed them being pricks. It doesn’t mean they were a) sane or b) representitive of government policy or general public sentiment.

Well that was an experience.

Made a speedy exit from work and now currently bobbing around the Mediterranean wondering what comes next, but seen lots of videos of lots of missile hits in Israel, including Tel Aviv.

I can’t imagine this will go unanswered from Israel. I guess they now have all the casus belli they need to start rapidly disassembling various bits of Iranian infrastructure.

.

Maybe if the Israelis didn’t have a solid track record of lying, folks might believe them.

Maybe if the travelling community didn’t have a solid track record of stealing anything that isn’t nailed down and some stuff that is, people wouldn’t be as hostile to their appearance in the local area.

Maybe if Pakistani men didn’t have a solid track record of abusing underage white girls, the ongoing disquiet in areas like Rochdale and Rotherham wouldn’t have happened.

Maybe if black men didn’t have a solid track record of being absentee fathers, black youths wouldn’t be over-represented in the penal system.

Disclaimer: I don’t believe any of these things, I’m just trying to see where STW mods think the red line is. It clearly isn’t crossed when we make identically phrased comment about Israelis, given DrJ’s nonsense getting the thumbs up

P1435 is your fault code

apologise when we **** up

I think this is one of the biggest differentiators between good and bad parents.

We can all lose our patience and/or be grumpy bastards, sometimes for no reason and sometimes with good reason but the grumpy bastard bit is executed in a sub-optimal manner. As long as you can have a conversation at their level explaining either why you did it, why you shouldn’t have, or how you could have done it better I don’t think any kid is going to grow up resenting you as a parent.

The first Above & Beyond: Acoustic album is good for this.

Depending on your mood (i.e. maybe not if you’re deep in a hole) The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit I find oddly chilled.

Nothing at the moment, and it’s starting to take its toll.

Between working away for weeks at a time, 12 HR shifts on a facility with very little downtime activity, and then coming home to self-build a house, plus ~20hrs a week on a distance learning Engineering degree…

2 years so far of 2 kids and a wife not getting the dad/husband time they deserve. The end goal is keeping me going for now but I’m wondering how long I can keep this up?

I’ve not been on a proper bike ride for months

Let me guess – you’re not Arab.

No I’m not, but a lot of the guys I work with are and they live a happy, rewarding life in Israel as productive members of society. What’s your point?

And just for clarity it is the former IDF ombudsman who is claiming that Israel is likely to collapse within a year, not me*

The problem you’ve got here is your own words, provided without supporting statements, are there for everyone to see in this thread, just one page back.

Israeli society is falling apart and it looks as if the game’s up for the zionist experiment. Attack Iran and Hezbollah and things will deteriorate rapidly, and this is the gamble…… would the United States allow Israel to collapse with all the consequences of how much it would strengthen those in the region who don’t care about vital US interests, such as Iran?

At this point I think it’s just about you getting the last word, purely for the sake of arguing. I’ll save you the trouble this time – my guess is this time you would have given us a deep dive into semantics which eventually comes round to you never having said in your own words the exact phrase “Israel society is about to collapse” and so you’re right and I’m wrong.

This is Schrödinger’s Democracy. Israelis get to choose their leader (hooray!!) but they’re not responsible for the leader they choose.

It’s proportional representation in Israel, as 10 seconds of googling would tell you. The Israeli public have as much say in who their prime minister is as the British public does.

Despite Flyingox’s claims, based on walking around, that everything is hunky dory

You can misrepresent me all you want, I couldn’t care less. Although for clarity what I actually said was that Israeli society was not about to collapse, as you have repeatedly claimed. They’re at war with neighbours to the north, south and east; of course things aren’t “hunky dory”.

My point in posting here is to clarify for those who have given up on the Gaza thread that you are far from the Subject Matter Expert on Israeli society that the tone, content and frequency of your posting suggests you think you are. I’m giving a first hand account of how life in Israel is at the moment, based on being probably the only STWer who is here on any kind of regular, recurring basis: it’s carrying on as normal, way more normal than should be expected given the circumstances, society isn’t teetering on the edge, and all Israelis aren’t the bloodthirsty imperialist Arab-haters that some posters here would have us believe. I’ve got no agenda in trying to make it appear as something it’s not. I have a nice life in Scotland and if Israel really were the ultra-right wing fascist klepto-kakistocracy that some of you claim then there are plenty of easier, safer ways of making a living and I wouldn’t have been coming here for the last 5 years.

Wall of text….

…If Netanyahu hadn’t already put spokes in the negotiation team’s wheels throughout the war, Israel could already have achieved a hostage deal before Sinwar toughened his stance

…wall of text…

That nicely glosses over that earlier in the war Hamas was loudly proclaiming they’d use any ceasefire to re-arm and attack again. And despite that there was a ceasefire in November last year, one which Hamas broke by firing rockets into Sderot.

I don’t recall describing any of that DrJ. You seem keen on tarring an entire population with one brush on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. That’s not very cash money of you.

With respect I think I will trust the assessment of the situation provided by Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik former head of Military Colleges and IDF ombudsman rather more than yours.

Well, I mean obviously. If you accepted mine then you’d probably have to rethink all the “end of the Zionist experiment is near, Israel is eating itself” nonsense.

Well you are hardly going to hear anything other than a positive spin from the government and its agencies.

My source is being in Israel and walking about, seeing people buying cars and eating in restaurants and dancing in nightclubs and going to work and demonstrating en masse against Netanyahu and his government. You know, things that happen in a functional not-falling-apart society.

Israeli society is falling apart

It really, really, really isn’t. Source – I’m here at the moment.

That would require a full-scale war with Hezbollah and the invasion of Southern Lebanon

Speaking with folk over here I think that’s the goal. They’ve activated tons of immediate call-up reservists and everyone seems to be heading up north. Reading between the lines the plan is to clear Lebanon of Hezbollah as far as the Litani River, I guess to self-enforce UN resolutions 1701 and 1556, seeing as they’ve been effectively ignored for the last 18 years.

What that means for the general population in southern Lebanon is probably very grim.

The other thing coming from all of this is the Taiwanese pager company whose kit was apparently intercepted/exploded, Gold Apollo, have likely had their reputation shat on beyond repair.

think that Stephen Hawking lost a bet about the discovery of black holes didn’t he? Up until relatively recently while they accepted that in theory they exist, humans wouldn’t be able to ever discover them. Just because we haven’t found any evidence of (a) deity doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

I’m not sure that’s an equivalent arguement. Black holes were predicted as a logical extension of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and their existence has since been proven by observation. The reason Hawking conceded the bet was related to the nature of information that emits (or doesn’t…) from black holes, not whether or not they could ever be detected.

There isn’t a mathematical/astrophysical/etc. theory that predicts the existence of a deity.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/326250553306?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=AWVvs3R0R1q&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=7i7sewGmTwC&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Every box ticked

I’ve got a last gen ROG Strix G15 from box.co.uk that was £999.99

It has a Ryzen 9 (5900 maybe?) CPU, Radeon 6800m GPU, a 1440p 165Hz display and it plays anything I’ve thrown at it so far, including Cyberpunk, Elite Dangerous, Forza 5, Baldur’s Gate 3, Helldivers 2, etc. all at more than acceptable frame rates. So it can be done.

It definitely needs plugging into the mains when gaming, battery lasts about 15 minutes otherwise. I’ve also heard that plugging into an external monitor can give better performance than using the laptop display but I’ve not tried that.

I’d say go for it. I’ve changed pads and discs on older cars before and no real issues to speak of. I occasionally needed to use a long screwdriver in a fulcrum-type manner to shift the pistons in enough to get the new pads over the discs – I’ve since bought a piston compressor thing – but never anything particularly weird. Only thing I always found is that the brakes need a good few pumps to bite with the new pads/discs, so don’t just fit them and go straight off to the shops.

Driving stoned is easy. You account for it. You’re aware of the high.

I can 100% vouch for that not being the case. To my shame I once drove a girlfriend home from a party where we’d been smoking. It took me 2 hours to go from Frecheville to Totley and back because I could only concentrate on one thing at a time: either stay in the right lane or do the speed limit. Thankfully when I was concentrating on lane discipline my speed only dropped.

Another thinly veiled accusation of anti-semitism. I’m beginning to spot a pattern …

I’m not the one throwing around derogatory generalisations about an entire nation and then doubling down, but crack on with your pattern spotting I guess.