I always said that the aid pier was entirely performative, but that’s even more pathetic than I was expecting
A quarter of a billion well spent /S
Holy shit it was that expensive? Some defense contractor got a new yacht, I’m sure
Years ago I attended a friend’s sister’s wedding who was marrying the son of a defense contractor from Houston in Vegas. This motherfucker rented out multiple conference rooms at Paris for the ceremony and reception, open bar and meal for hundreds of people, rented two-story penthouse suites at MGM for the wedding party and flew all the family out to be there. He had to have blown hundreds of thousands on this ceremony that was over in half a day. That’s where a majority of our taxes go, to rich parasites like this. Think of every problem that the federal government just throws money at and you’ll find people like this. This is why we pay so much yet little ever gets accomplished. We’re all too busy squabbling with each other while they fleece us.
They have played us for absolute fools
It was always a literal boondoggle.
It existed to give the illusion if doing something to help, it was the equivalent to burning the aid money slowly while starving children watched.
Fuck Biden for doing shit like this and then insisting if he’s not president it has to be trump.
If it’s not Biden, it’ll be Trump. That’s the reality we’re facing
Yes, I thought it was clear that was what I was complaining about
Fuck Biden for doing shit like this and then insisting if he’s not president it has to be trump
It takes a special kind of evil to blatantly facilitate a genocide because you know if you’re held accountable even worse shit gets done.
They’re both pieces of shit.
Yeah well vote for Trump and you’ll see what a genocide actually looks like.
That’s the reality they’ve given us.
It’s okay, I have it on good authority that after Trump loses the next election that all the dem voters will say that the threat is gone now and will push for the drastic changes needed to stop situations where the choice is between a senile old right wing capital and a senile old far-right wing capitalist.
Or at least that’s what they’ve all been promising, that after this one last Trump time that everyone can finally be critical and demand better. Surely there won’t be another far-right threat to force all leftists to vote for a right winger, and we all know centrists will never vote left, it’s only the left that must change direction.
This hits so close to home as you perfectly captured exactly what I’ve had people tell me here and on reddit three presidential elections in a row. I get that people have short memories, but how do they keep falling for these same lines over and over again while everything burns down around us?
Well there is a wide range of experiences and perspectives.
For me personally, while theres a bunch of awful stuff going on, its not like those things didnt exist before. We have been dealing with nationalistic terrorism for at the very least since the end of the Vietnamese War.
I hate to sound all silver lining or whatever, but the reason I’m not worried is that over time, in general, it seems the majority slowly moves forward as fast as they can comfortably do so.
Objectively bad things like violent crime, unequal rights, tribalism, religion to an extent, have all declined consistently over my whole life.
And I will add that the republicans who are saying that their way of life is under attack, it absolutely is. I dont know why people expect these groups to just hear a well argued position and just decide to change their mind.
Its very rare for people to change against their local community without a strong driving factor, and a loud democrat is never going to be that.
And for the record, I dont care about Biden’s problems right now because even he is changing as fast as possible given his own biases and past experiences, and the fact that the democrats lead as a party leads me to being comfortable with the VP taking over if he dies or goes senile.
In fact I’d much rather a senile Biden to any version of Trump. Ive also yet to hear anyone say that the next election cycle is going to be more of the same since. I hear about optimism for our next possible choices.
You’re not wrong, also you must consider it’s because of all the people who don’t vote. They would have no clue about any of the choices you are talking about because they didn’t have to make the choice. Can’t forget something you never knew.
I was a super volunteer for both Bernie campaigns and everything that I ever looked at or heard regarding strategy, voting districts, and simple math, all said that the way to win on election is to get just a handful of those non-voters out to the polls, and then our ideas win handedly. I can’t remember the figures, but that second time around we had a million people sign up to volunteer and figured that if all of those people could get three traditional non-voters to the polls and vote for Bernie, we would have handedly won the early primaries, which was the priority that we had literally four years to organize and plan for. We didn’t realize we would win in Iowa but the media was going to declare former CIA asset Pete Buttegieg the winner anyway.
People have a lot of theories about what what stopped Bernie from winning and most of them are at least partly true, because we were up against everything. I remember feeling like every project or team I worked on or with was continually running into walls, mostly media walls, where our messages got spun and flipped against us. And I remember that last run, coming in hot to the primaries with massive fundraising, in February and March, before the other contenders dropped out and backed Biden, and I don’t know wtf Cornell West is up to right now, but at that moment in Bernie’s campaign he said something that has stuck with me: “RFK was shot in June.”
Man, that’s what people who are engaged in the process are up against; most of America has literally no clue about any of this happening. They live their life day to day, a quarter mile at a time, paycheck to paycheck, with zero time for politics, policy, law, and government. The engaged, undecided voter is like a unicorn, I’ve never seen one, and I’m pretty sure they’re only myth. And that’s my rant, thanks for sticking around. See you at the dinner buffet.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A US military pier, built two months ago as a way to bring sea-borne humanitarian aid into Gaza, is to be permanently dismantled within a few days, according to a new report.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the pier, which has had to be moved repeatedly to avoid bad weather, would be reconnected to the Gaza coastline on Wednesday but would operate for just the next few days before being disassembled by the US army and navy.
The pier scheme, first unveiled by Joe Biden in his State of the Union address in March, was always intended to be a temporary measure to complement the meagre amount of aid being allowed across land crossings by Israel, but US officials told Reuters in June it would last until August or September.
The eastern Mediterranean off the Gaza coast had been choppier in the summer months than had been expected with stormy weather making it necessary to move the pier in and out of position repeatedly.
Apart from a day’s operations to clear the backlog of humanitarian assistance on the beach, the WFP has continued to suspend its convoys pending a full security review.
Over its two months in operation, about 8,800 metric tons of aid has been unloaded off the pier, about 500 truckloads, equivalent to a single day of deliveries before the war began.
The original article contains 495 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The only purpose was for Israel to use it to land troops anyway. Fuck our whole involvement in this fucking travesty.
Not that anything I say makes one god damn bit of difference, but I TOLD YOU SO
What gets me every time they talk about this pier… The ships in the photos are amphibians landing ships designed with ramps and flat bottoms so they can unload on the beach without a pier. The pier is totally unnecessary in this scenario
Yeah, but then you’re on a beach, so you need vehicles that can drive on a beach, possibly in wet sand, possibly still half in the water. Unless you’re actually doing amphibious assault in enemy territory building a pier is a good idea as it makes unloading vehicles/cargo much easier and broadens the type of boats you can use for transport.
100% agreed. If they had been serious about this whole we’re going to bring supplies in from the sea. Day 1 through 30 should have been amphibious vehicles. Day 30 through 60 should have been pier-based vehicles, and 60 plus should be showing massive high throughput. With UN peacekeepers at some point to prevent bombing of the aid caravans.
UN peacekeepers lol.
The pier was necessary for Israeli ops tho
How so?
To rescue the 4 hostages in return for almost 300 dead Palestinians and magnitudes more of wounded people.
This right here is the correct answer.
I don’t think it’s credible to say that The pier was built for the Israeli rescue operations.
In fact, without the pier they still would have executed the operation. Pier was convenient, but not necessary
In fact, without the pier they still would have executed the operation. Pier was convenient, but not necessary
There’s absolutely no way they’d have allowed it’s construction of it wasn’t necessary for them. We can tell because it’s already being dismantled
Those are the little boats that take things from the pier to the shore. The boats that take things things over the ocean to the pier are not landing vessels. They are large ships and only have a cargo ramp, which requires a pier to unload. I looked at hundreda of pictures before writing this and didn’t see one large ship with beach landing capabilities. The largest landing ship I saw was the USAV Matamoros, Runnymede-class ship with a capacity of 20 stacked containers, with no ability to load them onto trucks. It needs a pier to load trucks. Could maybe carry eight trucks already loaded, which is nothing.
