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The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The rocket launchers Hezbollah planned to use in this past weekend’s attack were located in civilian areas:

The Hezbollah terrorist organization places its terrorist infrastructure in the middle of the civilian population while using Lebanese civilians as human shields. 90% of the launches were from the heart of a civilian area, near civilian facilities such as mosques, schools, UN sites, etc

This is typical of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest. It is a deliberate trap that sacrifices its own citizens in order to demonize Israel for protecting itself.

(2) Some good news – an Israeli hostage has been rescued by the IDF in an operation the details of which are being kept secret:

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said on social media: “I am overjoyed by the successful rescue of the hostage Qaid Farhan al-Qadi. Qaid, a Muslim resident of the Bedouin Israeli community in the Negev, who was kidnapped on October 7th from where he worked in Kibbutz Magen when Hamas terrorists came to indiscriminately abduct, murder, and rape — without distinction between race or religion.

“I congratulate the IDF, the Shin Bet, and all the security services, and send my blessings to his family on his return – which is a moment of joy for the State of Israel and Israeli society as a whole.

Hamas didn’t discriminate when it captured hostages. Quite a few were Israeli Arabs.

(3) One of the hostages who was freed last fall explains how she and her family were treated:

“Almost daily one of them would enter the room, saying, ‘Would be better for you to be a Muslim woman,’ and once the terrorist sent one of his comrades to get a head covering to put on me, and show me what it means to be a Muslim woman,” Yanai said.

“As a woman, my biggest fear is being sold. That someone would forcefully marry me and that I will have to convert to Islam.” …

At one point, she said, the Hamas brutes interrogated her about her father for an entire day — including how much he earned and what price he would be willing to pay to have her released.

Yanai learned later that they had sent her father a photo of her and threatened to murder her if he didn’t cough up ransom money.

(4) Mark Zuckerberg has some admissions and some regrets:

“Big win for free speech”? I think not. It happened, and the suppression of the Hunter laptop story was part of the reason that Biden became president.

(5) Trump announced that Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are now part of his transition team.

Comments

Roundup — 46 Comments

  3. “Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:”

    Is he going to admit that a leading reason why he’s admitting these things only now is that the prospect of a second Trump administration (with a good memory) may possibly be somewhere between concerning and unsettling for him and his associates?

  4. Zuckerberg can go F himself.

    When he had to stand up for freedom of expression he hid in the closet.
    Of course, being the leftist progressive that he is, he had no problem helping the Biden campaign and his BS excuse that he was pressured rings hollow. After all, no one pressured him in regards to Zucker bucks.
    And don’t be surprised if we see a reprise of Zucker bucks for the upcoming elections

    Not sure why he now admits he was wrong, but I will guess he is just covering his ass in the event Trump wins in November. More than likely, he would do it all over again if he knew no one would notice.

  7. It’s unlikely Zuckerberg can ever truly atone for his role in enabling Deep State censorship and undermining the First Amendment. But it may be significant that he made these admissions in a letter to Jim Jordan. It could be a sign the rats are leaving the sinking ship.

  8. Rats may leave a sinking ship, but they are still rats.
    Rats will just find a new place to infest.

  9. Just say that Jack Smith indicted Trump again for the documents. My words would betray me, so I will not comment further, except to say The Anger is Stong in me.

  10. So dana bash gets the first interview

    The uae is not amused at frances move against durov

    No its the election interference case same carp different flavor

    Dread pirate smith doesnt dissapoint

  11. @FOAF: But it may be significant that he made these admissions in a letter to Jim Jordan. It could be a sign the rats are leaving the sinking ship.

    He is about the only individual who could express this publicly in writing, without a force 5 hurricane of MSM shouting him down. He’s actually committed some significant leadership, and should be encouraged as he has encouraged lesser figures in the social media and ‘news’ media to support our Constitution instead of one scurrilous ruling party. Let the avalanche continue!

  12. I just saw on the news some Major General say ” we can walk and chew gum at the same time” absolutely brilliant. The criticism I hear the most is availability, never a word about what would happen with a carrier being sunk.

  14. Kamala won’t even do the CNN interview alone. She will have Walz with her. A Big Girl could handle an interview by herself.

  15. Regarding Zuckerberg’s new found penitence, I understand that Hitler just called with apologies for that little Jew peccadillo and he wants to know if we’re all good. He said he won’t do it again, he swearsies.

  16. “Big win for free speech”? I think not.

    –neo

    But still a win for free speech, surely.

    I find conservatives often set the rules for winning unreasonably high. Things usually start small before getting bigger.

    IMO the left is smarter about this.
    ___________________________________

    If people feel they don’t have the power to change a situation, they will not even think about it.

    –Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”
    ___________________________________

    When I was on the left, we celebrated every win, however small. There was always the caveat that the war was not over, but we celebrated the wins.

  17. @huxley:IMO the left is smarter about this.

    The Left does not settle for words and symbolism. Is Zuckerberg still funding Dem groups to harvest ballots like he did in 2020? Did he say he did anything wrong there?

  18. Exactly, Niketas. I don’t hear Zuck apologizing for the Zuck Bucks that did so much to rig the 2020 election.

  19. Niketas Choniates, Kate:

    But are we as conservatives and Americans better off for Zuckerberg admitting this fault publicly? Or does it make no difference?

    Is it no good until Zuck endorses Trump and gives all his money to MAGA?

    When are conservatives allowed to notice and celebrate a win?

  20. Oh, this is definitely a step in the right direction, huxley. The previous line was that no such government pressure happened. That is no longer a sustainable argument.

  21. @huxley:But are we as conservatives and Americans better off for Zuckerberg admitting this fault publicly

    Not if we confuse it for a meaningful win and go back to sleep. This is media narrative, him saying that it used to happen and that he pinkie swears it won’t again. The point is to get people like us thinking it’s over and done with while they go on to something else or just keep doing what they were doing.

    Or is it no good until Zuck endorses Trump and gives all his money to MAGA?

    There is any amount of meaningful action that can happen short of this, we don’t need to play excluded middle games.

    When are conservatives allowed to notice and celebrate a win?

    When there’s a meaningful change involving real world consquences.

  22. neo, Kate, Niketas:

    Take the win. Brace up, ruck up, drive on.

    Zuck still has one of the world’s most punchable faces. I doubt that will ever change.

  23. When there’s a meaningful change involving real world consquences.

    Niketas Choniates:

    To me conservatives keep moving the goalposts so nothing, at least when it happens, is ever good enough.

    Zuck didn’t have to say that. I’m not quite sure why he did. But surely it at least gives Victor Davis Hanson another item to enumerate as part of his splendid critiques of the left.

    I say that counts for something.

  24. O he needs to more than apologize he needs to make amends remember the way all the platforms grovelled insisting. They could never let trump win something on that order of genuflection

  25. Zuckerberg’s admission is meaningless. We already knew that the leftist media censors and they are not going to stop.
    While those on the left not only don’t care but view censorship of the evil right as entirely justified. From their exalted moral heights, they proclaim who are the oppressors and… oppressors have no rights.

  27. Of course. If any further demonstration was necessary.

    Conservatives will not count a win until it’s 1980, Reagan is President and It’s Morning in America again.

    I exaggerate, of course. But so far in the discussion conservatives are entirely unwilling to grant a win, unless …. a bunch of Big Wins immediately accrue.

    That’s not how individuals, organizations or movements progress. Small wins first, Big Wins later.

    Have commenters here ever grown in significant ways? Ever lost weight or gotten more muscular?

    At the beginning, the wins are trivial. I lost one pound. I did one more pull-up.

    But that’s how it works. If I say to myself, Í’m still 50# overweight or I can do only six pull-ups, it doesn’t matter. So eventually I give up.

    No, people grow by effort and by encouraging themselves by their small results.

    I say that works in political movements too.

  28. @huxley:At the beginning, the wins are trivial. I lost one pound. I did one more pull-up.

    Zuckerberg’s admissions here, in your analogy, would be like a declared admission that one should have gone to the gym more often. It’s not even a declaration of intention to join a gym at some unspecified time in the future.

    It is not one pullup.

    Michigan is changing its election rules in advance of when they legally go into effect next year. That’s an example of the kind of win the left gets.

  29. It is not one pullup.

    Niketas Choniates:

    So you say. I say different.

    I am convinced that many conservatives will always find a way to say things don’t make a difference.

    Sad.

  30. @huxley:I am convinced that many conservatives will always find a way to say things don’t make a difference.

    It’s words vs actions huxley.

    What is different in the mechanics of the election after Zuckerberg’s comment? No actions are involved.

    What is different in the mechanics of the election when Michigan’s Secretary of State enforces rules that aren’t actually legal yet? The ballots will be counted differently in one the three states Harris must win.

    A pullup is an action. An expressed regret for not having gone to the gym as often as one should have is wind.

  31. Niketas Choniates:

    Pathetic.

    If you don’t understand that one more pull-up this week is not an action leading to two more pull-ups later, I guess you’ve never fought that battle or maybe any battle.

  32. Huxley, further to your encouraging tone, the NY Times has run several op-eds in the past few days criticizing Harris. In earlier months they probably would not have published those. Maybe internal Dem polling is not like the public ones.

  33. @huxley:If you don’t understand that one more pull-up this week…

    I keep telling you what my objection is, that no actual pullup has happened. You keep ignoring my objection, inventing a different one, and arguing with that one instead of what I actually said. That, sir, is not honest.

    Zuckerberg put out some words. Words are not actions. Certainly they are not anything that make up for the actions he has taken in the past, and is taking now, to damage conservatives.

    I gave an example of an action that will actually change how the election will happen, an action that is happening now. You’re just pretending I didn’t say that, that I didn’t explain the distinction between words and actions.

    In addition I challenged you to explain the real world effect, in actions, of the words you’re so excited about, and you did not do so and just retreated back to adjectives.

    You can keep doing this as long as you like; but it will not fool everyone who reads the exchange.

  34. Far too many Republicans/Conservatives want to literally whine about almost everything – even something like (4) ‘Mark Zuckerberg has some admissions and some regrets’!?!

    Elon Musk purchased Twitter almost 2-years ago, and has moved it in a positive direction since then—a positive Conservative direction, especially considering what it was before then. Musk exposed how the Government & Twitter had worked together…

    How many REPs/Conservatives (CONs???) here spend $8-month for the X’s subscription fee?

    Musk & Zuckerberg had planned a boxing match some time back … maybe Zuckerberg respects Musk and felt guilty? I don’t care why Zuckerberg finally came forward with the truth…

    Take the Win and stop whining, complaining, critiquing, criticizing, etc. about it. Who knows, maybe Google will be next… 😉

  35. @Karmi:Elon Musk purchased Twitter almost 2-years ago, and has moved it in a positive direction since then

    Musk took concrete actions. He fired a bunch of people. He changed the blue check system. He spent a lot of his own money to make those changes.

    Zuckerberg has offered only wind. All his fact-checking partnerships and algorithms to suppress conservative views and reporting inconvenient to the Dems are still in place, and possibly he is still giving them money to harvest ballots.

  36. Key point is that Zuckerberg’s admission makes it harder to deny that the censorship is happening and undercuts the assertion that the
    Dems are defenders of democracy.

    I care more about political persuasion than I do about the state of Zuckerberg,s soul.

  37. @ David Foster > “Imagining the script conference that resulted in the political movie that is now in progress:”

    Putting the train of events* so succinctly makes them sound even more fictional — no producer would ever buy that script, unless it was maybe Mel Brooks looking for a new farce.

    *And that was just since last June (!!!) — try starting back in 2008 for improbable political situations.

  38. Taibbi on Zuckerberg – he celebrates the win, but questions the motive behind it:
    https://www.racket.news/p/zuckerberg-defies-the-borg

    Because reporting is done in herds, no one wildebeest can break formation without screwing things up for the others. So, they’ll all hold the line, until they all stop holding the line. This is why a multi-billionaire like Zuckerberg, a human supertanker whose tiniest move causes market-disrupting fluctuations in his company’s share price, is able to correct himself faster than mere line reporters for media companies.

    Governments can’t allow the public to have a debate about whether or not they are “censoring” people, which is why everyone who’s made claims in that direction, from Durov to Elon Musk to Glenn Greenwald to Max Blumenthal to me, has been tarred with the Hitler-of-the-month treatment in the press and dismissed as quacks, Trump supporters, or both.

    Zuckerberg putting “censor” in writing forces the Dana Bashes of the world to start adding the Meta CEO to their already bloated list of Putin-loving right-wing fabulists. This technique is already stretched beyond the limits of plausibility, and a full defection from the Bullshit Cartel of Zuckerberg — whose internal analysts surely have a more accurate read on the population’s leanings than any poll agency — would make continued dismissals of censorship claims all but impossible. Were he to give full evidence to someone like Jordan, it would make the Twitter Files look like a mild appetizer.

    Some who were involved with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case on digital censorship are a little frosty today, irritated that Zuckerberg’s admissions came too late to help make their public case. As someone who dealt with frustration trying to roll the same story uphill, and whose own articles are frequently vaporized on Meta without explanation, I understand, but choose to look on the bright side. Zuckerberg’s letter can only be good news. Our idiot ruling junta finally pushed too far, and a man moved to offer authorities a taste of embarrassment can surely be convinced to serve the whole meal. Mr. Zuckerberg, can we hear the rest?

  39. AesopFan on August 28, 2024 at 1:04 am links to a great article on ‘Zuckerberg putting “censor” in writing‘ – Zuckerberg Defies the Borg by Matt Taibbi (of the infamous Twitter Files).

    Intro:

    As governments everywhere tighten their grip on the Internet, Meta’s CEO blows a hole in years of official lies. How authorities brought this on themselves

    • ‘In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…’

    • ‘The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election … the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.’

    Rep. Jim Jordan’s X account covers some more, and also had a 12:03 PM · Jul 27, 2023 Post – “THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE”. Instagram gets mentioned in that Post…

    Another ‘tiny leak in a dike’…

  40. I’m with Niketas Choniates and Kate on Zuckerberg. It’s part of the game, very much like Lois Lerner’s stage-managed “admission” that launched the IRS targeting scandal into public view. “Mistakes were made.”

    Now, the next part of the censorship plan can go forward. Attacks against what comes next will be deflected by insisting that (i) social media censorship is “old news;” (ii) Zuckerberg already admitted what was done and expressed regret; and (iii) that was mean old Biden anyway, and he’s gone now. Leftist censors will insist that this admission from Zuckerberg removes the 2020 censorship as an issue (i.e., “old news”) and demand that critics prove that new censorship is ongoing. They they’ll rely on their old bag of tricks to stall and stonewall, making it incredibly difficult to prove censorship in real time. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

    The right is fighting ghosts here. Zuckerberg is not our friend. And I don’t for a second buy this as anything more than the censors’ next move.

  41. I never have and never do think of Zuckerberg as my friend. I want to punch him in the face.

  42. IrishOtter49,

    Very good observation. A fist and Zuck’s face seem to be made for each other, almost preternaturally.

  44. This is typical of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest. It is a deliberate trap that sacrifices its own citizens in order to demonize Israel for protecting itself.

    IIRC, Nasrallah lives underground, beneath a hospital.

  45. “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”

    – Winston Churchill on Zuckerberg, I mean WWII

  46. An additional benefit is that conservatives can now point to what was sneered at as a “conspiracy theory”. Got any more, guys?

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