"The U.S. will take over the Gaza strip...we'll own it.” So said President Donald Trump, reading from a prepared statement with a smirking Benjamin Netanyahu.
"A big beautiful wall, and we'll make the Mexicans pay for it"
Captain Bullshit rides again.
He likes stirring up crap, constantly, to distract everybody from whatever else he's doing - or not doing. He wants every conversation to be about him - that's the Alpha and Omega of him, not as a persona slight I mean, but as his entire business model and raison d'etre. He's like the humanoid version of social-media algorithms that profit out of grabbing eyeballs. Churnover in lackeys and newscycles alike.
On the other side of the pond, it would previously be called flying-a-kite to gauge a reaction - but it's much, much more more than this with him, because if everyone else is constantly being thrown off balance, then by default he's the one on firm ground in the centre of the storm he's unleashing.
Yeah it’s just jarring when you got a president with serious executive power doing deals like this. On the other hand it is precisely a position like this that gives this kind of style power: your threats must seem real.
It is a real and deadly threat, too - I have no doubt that in one segment of his mind he's turning this over and thinking "sure, this could really work out yuuge!".
Next up he'll try to make the schadenfreude-type reaction of relief if/when he changes tack work to his advantage, to advance whatever plans B-Z he has simmering on the back burner.
This is real neighbourhood protection-racket style tactics; in one sense, it's better now that we are seeing it all out in the open and up front, rather than the polished-turd bullshit that Foreign Affairs magazine has been selling for ages on behalf of the nice respectable people who retire in Martha's Vinyard. He's like the Rodney Dangerfield of the Establishment, and they're horrified he's so gauche in their Club.
Also, this elevator pitch looks like it was picked straight from the script of Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin - I was about to copy and paste* (*both in writing and in actual speech he has this incessant uptalk, valleygirl "ha-ha-just-kidding" tone that I will spare you all from), but I'll just leave the relevant link here: graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-and-the-laws-of-war -
_Both Thiel and Vance are subscribers to the techno-authoritarian philosophies of Curtis Yarvin, who seeks to re-engineer governments into smaller “patchworks” controlled by tech corporations “without regard”, as he put it, “to the residents’ opinions”._
In a way, this is a magnification of how Northern Ireland was used by the British Security State (the "Securocrats") to test out and train their own forces (and apply their own creative legal tailoring for monitoring and neutralising threats), close at hand. In Palestine, we have the perfect laboratory for the mad scientists to create the beta version of the brave new world for all of us.
F my life - I hadn't read Yarvin in at least 5 years - despite getting a thing or two accurate (yes, it's an oligarchy), he still manages eyewatering levels of navel gazing horseshit drivel. I'll add Sam Kriss isn't incapable of that either, but at least Sam isn't a Sauron.
Also: I've just finished 'War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right' by ethnomusicologist (he started out following and interviewing death-metal types) Benjamin Teitelbaum. It's a hell of a ride. I was looking for stuff by esotericists Evola and Guénon at my library, and it was sparse pickings - but this kept coming up in the searches and I thought "ok why not?"
Chapters 19 and 21 ("Unite the Right" and "The Reckoning") are particularly eye-opening regarding the current topic. It is simply not possible to do justice to the surrealism of the... plot?... plots? plotters? It's difficult to keep clear that this is not a script by the Coen brothers, as it has tropes and themes and characters reminiscent of Fargo, Burn After Reading, or even Our Man in Panama and Robocop.
_Microcities_. That's the McGuffin that powers this particular strand of the book. _Microcities to house refugees in North Africa_.
One of the characters (it seems too anemic to simply call them people) is Michael Bagley, of a supposed Private Intelligence firm called Jellyfish, that does a reverse takeover of a spin-off of a Blackwater fragment (when it fractured after some meddlesome kids uncovered it was Murder Inc.). Even the _Blackwater_ executive (shortly to be ousted) thought the guy was flaky and shady.
(And: there's an alt-right Iranian-nationalist sap, newly at the head of the short-lived "Alt-Right Corporation" (that was... the actual name) who is being strung along for reasons that are not entirely clear, by Bagley and another guy only referred to in the book as "The Londoner." In fairness to the author, he points out that three reliable sources warn him off about poking the wasp's nest surrounding The Londoner's identity, and considering the one-and-two-degrees-of-separation from people like Boris Johnson's pal implicated in a plot to beat up a journalist, and the status of the author as a new father of toddlers, he can be forgiven for dropping lots of breadcrumbs in the references and asides but not positively ID'ing him).
((Bagley was sentenced to prison for 4 years after an FBI sting for being willing to moneylaunder on behalf of Mexican Cartels, got out after 2 for good behaviour, and started a bottled water company called "Jellyfish," and now is putting together a bid for an industrial site in upstate NY that has lots of water and power potential for an AI Industrial plant. However weird you think this summary is, it's even weirder to read the details.))
But I just have this image, like from the movie 'The Graduate' where Dustin Hoffman's character is being told his future is in "Plastics" - but it's Trump, and some one is giving an elevator pitch: "_Microcities_, Mr. President. Microcities for refugees."
Of course it's a bluff. Or another senior moment. Just like Biden the man is likely in the grips of dementia.
I can't see resettlements of Palestinians into Jordan or Egypt going very well. What bribes would allow it.
He backed off his tough tariff nonsense immediately because the market would have had a sad. But wasn't it nice that he was in the news and all the leaders had to call him up and talk? Then they agreed to meaningless conditions to stop the big fentanyl mess.
Lol. It fucking amazes me how media aren’t sceptical at all to what he says. In irish media i remember on the 6 o’clock news they were talking about musks poll on whether or not he would leave twitter. As if it was serious. If i know he’s full of shit how does professional news people not know ??
It’s hard to know how much he’s bluffing and how much he’s talking shit he’ll need to walk back later. He might have heard people singing he praises about Gaza beach front property but the Israelis don’t have the capacity to do this and the US military top brass would likely recognize this as being openly illegal and refuse the order. I guess at some point someone will explain the consequences politically and legally for giving an illegal order and seeing it being ignored - not good for the Trump.
I don’t think there’s any 5D chess going on though. Trump says crazy things and now other people might need to work together to prevent those crazy things from happening, at great costs to everyone
I honestly don't think he means it - I think that he's deliberately confusing everybody by throwing out one more outrageous statement after the other so that noone knows what he'll actually do.
AND, when people hear that he's not in fact going to invade Greenland or Gaza (or Canada, for that matter) they'll be relieved that he's "only" sending all the refugees to Gitmo.
I also suspect, and I don't hope to be proven wrong, that actually taking over Gaza is such an outrageous thing to do that he couldn't actually do it if he wanted - Congress and maybe even the army itself would probably stop him. But in the meantime he's wasting his opponents' time, in a quite masterful fashion.
One not entirely incredible conspiracy theory would be that Netanyahu and Hamas leadership are actually in cahoots. Hamas don't worry about casualties so much, they think more Israeli casualties now means more soldiers for them in the next generation. I don't think they'd actually sell Gaza, though, as it is their power base.
The PA in the West Bank, on the other hand, have been considered Quislings by many Palestinians for years now, doing Israel's dirty work. Though their position, to be fair, can't be very easy either.
It seems to me that the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel shows that the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas are in cahoots, even though we probably did not see what really took place on that day, but we were given some computer-generated images.
"A big beautiful wall, and we'll make the Mexicans pay for it"
Captain Bullshit rides again.
He likes stirring up crap, constantly, to distract everybody from whatever else he's doing - or not doing. He wants every conversation to be about him - that's the Alpha and Omega of him, not as a persona slight I mean, but as his entire business model and raison d'etre. He's like the humanoid version of social-media algorithms that profit out of grabbing eyeballs. Churnover in lackeys and newscycles alike.
On the other side of the pond, it would previously be called flying-a-kite to gauge a reaction - but it's much, much more more than this with him, because if everyone else is constantly being thrown off balance, then by default he's the one on firm ground in the centre of the storm he's unleashing.
Yeah it’s just jarring when you got a president with serious executive power doing deals like this. On the other hand it is precisely a position like this that gives this kind of style power: your threats must seem real.
It is a real and deadly threat, too - I have no doubt that in one segment of his mind he's turning this over and thinking "sure, this could really work out yuuge!".
Next up he'll try to make the schadenfreude-type reaction of relief if/when he changes tack work to his advantage, to advance whatever plans B-Z he has simmering on the back burner.
This is real neighbourhood protection-racket style tactics; in one sense, it's better now that we are seeing it all out in the open and up front, rather than the polished-turd bullshit that Foreign Affairs magazine has been selling for ages on behalf of the nice respectable people who retire in Martha's Vinyard. He's like the Rodney Dangerfield of the Establishment, and they're horrified he's so gauche in their Club.
Also, this elevator pitch looks like it was picked straight from the script of Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin - I was about to copy and paste* (*both in writing and in actual speech he has this incessant uptalk, valleygirl "ha-ha-just-kidding" tone that I will spare you all from), but I'll just leave the relevant link here: graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-and-the-laws-of-war -
- and a further commentary by Thomas Fazi on Yarvin's Starship Troopers view of the Future: https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/a-victory-for-covid-policy-sceptics
(and that I will quote):
_Both Thiel and Vance are subscribers to the techno-authoritarian philosophies of Curtis Yarvin, who seeks to re-engineer governments into smaller “patchworks” controlled by tech corporations “without regard”, as he put it, “to the residents’ opinions”._
In a way, this is a magnification of how Northern Ireland was used by the British Security State (the "Securocrats") to test out and train their own forces (and apply their own creative legal tailoring for monitoring and neutralising threats), close at hand. In Palestine, we have the perfect laboratory for the mad scientists to create the beta version of the brave new world for all of us.
F my life - I hadn't read Yarvin in at least 5 years - despite getting a thing or two accurate (yes, it's an oligarchy), he still manages eyewatering levels of navel gazing horseshit drivel. I'll add Sam Kriss isn't incapable of that either, but at least Sam isn't a Sauron.
Also: I've just finished 'War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right' by ethnomusicologist (he started out following and interviewing death-metal types) Benjamin Teitelbaum. It's a hell of a ride. I was looking for stuff by esotericists Evola and Guénon at my library, and it was sparse pickings - but this kept coming up in the searches and I thought "ok why not?"
Chapters 19 and 21 ("Unite the Right" and "The Reckoning") are particularly eye-opening regarding the current topic. It is simply not possible to do justice to the surrealism of the... plot?... plots? plotters? It's difficult to keep clear that this is not a script by the Coen brothers, as it has tropes and themes and characters reminiscent of Fargo, Burn After Reading, or even Our Man in Panama and Robocop.
_Microcities_. That's the McGuffin that powers this particular strand of the book. _Microcities to house refugees in North Africa_.
One of the characters (it seems too anemic to simply call them people) is Michael Bagley, of a supposed Private Intelligence firm called Jellyfish, that does a reverse takeover of a spin-off of a Blackwater fragment (when it fractured after some meddlesome kids uncovered it was Murder Inc.). Even the _Blackwater_ executive (shortly to be ousted) thought the guy was flaky and shady.
(And: there's an alt-right Iranian-nationalist sap, newly at the head of the short-lived "Alt-Right Corporation" (that was... the actual name) who is being strung along for reasons that are not entirely clear, by Bagley and another guy only referred to in the book as "The Londoner." In fairness to the author, he points out that three reliable sources warn him off about poking the wasp's nest surrounding The Londoner's identity, and considering the one-and-two-degrees-of-separation from people like Boris Johnson's pal implicated in a plot to beat up a journalist, and the status of the author as a new father of toddlers, he can be forgiven for dropping lots of breadcrumbs in the references and asides but not positively ID'ing him).
((Bagley was sentenced to prison for 4 years after an FBI sting for being willing to moneylaunder on behalf of Mexican Cartels, got out after 2 for good behaviour, and started a bottled water company called "Jellyfish," and now is putting together a bid for an industrial site in upstate NY that has lots of water and power potential for an AI Industrial plant. However weird you think this summary is, it's even weirder to read the details.))
But I just have this image, like from the movie 'The Graduate' where Dustin Hoffman's character is being told his future is in "Plastics" - but it's Trump, and some one is giving an elevator pitch: "_Microcities_, Mr. President. Microcities for refugees."
There WAS a "Riviera of the Middle East" once, it was called Lebanon and Beirut was a lovely cosmopolitan city. Then, it paid someone to destroy it.
Of course it's a bluff. Or another senior moment. Just like Biden the man is likely in the grips of dementia.
I can't see resettlements of Palestinians into Jordan or Egypt going very well. What bribes would allow it.
He backed off his tough tariff nonsense immediately because the market would have had a sad. But wasn't it nice that he was in the news and all the leaders had to call him up and talk? Then they agreed to meaningless conditions to stop the big fentanyl mess.
Yeah I know. Thats my feeling too.
Lol. It fucking amazes me how media aren’t sceptical at all to what he says. In irish media i remember on the 6 o’clock news they were talking about musks poll on whether or not he would leave twitter. As if it was serious. If i know he’s full of shit how does professional news people not know ??
Fix it all up, and build the “Riviera of the Middle East” ?
Imagine if he proposed something like that here. Western NC, maybe?
It'd be shot down as an evil manifestation of da S0c!a(ism!!!! :0000
Like Little Finger told the Spider, "Chaos is a ladder."
He's at least half serious with dollar signs for eyes. The son-in-law probably soiling himself with anticipation.
Yeh jared is doin alright for sure. Why aren’t the media talking about him ? Coz they’re useless cunts.
I wonder if he is trying to distract from Elon Musk and his minions getting access to the Federal payment system.
It’s hard to know how much he’s bluffing and how much he’s talking shit he’ll need to walk back later. He might have heard people singing he praises about Gaza beach front property but the Israelis don’t have the capacity to do this and the US military top brass would likely recognize this as being openly illegal and refuse the order. I guess at some point someone will explain the consequences politically and legally for giving an illegal order and seeing it being ignored - not good for the Trump.
I don’t think there’s any 5D chess going on though. Trump says crazy things and now other people might need to work together to prevent those crazy things from happening, at great costs to everyone
I honestly don't think he means it - I think that he's deliberately confusing everybody by throwing out one more outrageous statement after the other so that noone knows what he'll actually do.
AND, when people hear that he's not in fact going to invade Greenland or Gaza (or Canada, for that matter) they'll be relieved that he's "only" sending all the refugees to Gitmo.
I also suspect, and I don't hope to be proven wrong, that actually taking over Gaza is such an outrageous thing to do that he couldn't actually do it if he wanted - Congress and maybe even the army itself would probably stop him. But in the meantime he's wasting his opponents' time, in a quite masterful fashion.
The American Army and Congressmen love wars. More money for the military industrial complex means more money for them.
I think that the Palestinian authorities have already sold Gaza, and we are watching a theater play.
One not entirely incredible conspiracy theory would be that Netanyahu and Hamas leadership are actually in cahoots. Hamas don't worry about casualties so much, they think more Israeli casualties now means more soldiers for them in the next generation. I don't think they'd actually sell Gaza, though, as it is their power base.
The PA in the West Bank, on the other hand, have been considered Quislings by many Palestinians for years now, doing Israel's dirty work. Though their position, to be fair, can't be very easy either.
It seems to me that the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel shows that the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas are in cahoots, even though we probably did not see what really took place on that day, but we were given some computer-generated images.