Michelle Mone admits involvement with 'VIP lane' PPE company

Count me among those who's bitten their tongue while the fights have raged on DU.

I'll make an exception for this reply. I've long had a policy of not discussing Israel-Palestine issues on American forums because I don't see anything I have to say as being able to persuade those who are likely to leap on anything I write and often argue in bad faith because no verbal conflict on this can go unwon.

I read Twitter (very selectively), newspapers, watch some TV news (mainly the UK's Channel 4) and some other online sites, and the balance of expressed opinion on DU jars a great deal with the balance of sentiments I see elsewhere, and certainly in my own country, Scotland.

The Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has had inlaws trapped in Gaza since the Hamas atrocity, and they were only able to leave a couple of days ago having said what they feared might be their final goodbyes a number of times. He went public with his and his wife's anguish, and also reached out to the Scottish Jewish community in heartfelt sympathy, and was welcomed. He has been calling for a ceasefire from the start. He has also condemned in absolute terms Hamas's attack. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has done the same, and has also been sure to reach out to the London Jewish community as well as people of his own faith and none.

It seems no one can post on the issues around this conflict on DU without being pounced upon, usually by what appears to be a gang of the same screennames that always crop up and generally rehearse the same hasbara arguments over and over, usually laced with the old debate-stopper, accusations of antisemitism.

Perhaps because I do have a "side" in this conflict, my perception is that this happens more to people who criticize the Israeli government, and especially its conduct since Hamas's atrocities.

My "side" has long been with the broad left in Israel and others who oppose their government's policies, along with Palestinians who have suffered brutal, often fatal, attacks, land theft, unlawful detention, illegal destruction and confiscation of their crops and property, and manipulation of their political life for far too many years while Israel's government has done nothing to protect them, but on the contrary has encouraged the West Bank settlers and also Hamas. Any analysis of the current eruption of conflict that doesn't include that historical conflict or handwaves it away is disgraceful, and it's impossible to believe that intelligent, politically aware people can defend it in good faith.

Netanyahu has boasted repeatedly about how he has thwarted any attempts to resolve the Palestinian issue over the years to serve his own agenda. I could post a video of him literally doing so, but the tendency too often is to dismiss any such evidence on the basis of its source, or embark on baroque justifications that end up in dizzying bouts of goalpost-shifting and selective readings of history that get nobody anywhere.

He is the prime mover behind a horrible situation, though he has plenty of fellow travellers, and Hamas are as much his tools as they are of any other malign entity. Blaming the Palestinian population for not choosing a different, less savage and corrupt government than Hamas ignores the fact that to change the situation, ordinary Palestinians would have to face down not just Hamas, but the covert and sometimes not so covert sabotage of the Israeli government.

I have watched Israeli ambassadors and government spokespeople in mainstream TV interviews, and have to say that their arrogance and the inhumanity of their language has done more to incite anti-Israeli feeling than almost anything, to the extent that the Israeli government has stopped fielding the Israeli Ambassador to the UK (Tzipi Hotovely, a savage and notorious rightwinger even before she took up the post), I suspect because they realized she was turning people against them.

I would warn people who adopt some of the same complacent, self-justificatory and often utterly heartless lines of argument on DU that they are in danger of achieving the same result. There's no point in "winning" an argument if in the course of doing so you reveal attitudes that would not appear on DU (or at least not without being seriously challenged) in relation to conflicts involving other countries.

I'm not going to repeat some of the objectionable arguments I've seen on DU, but any who say they haven't seen anti-Hamas sentiment stray into anti-Palestinian rhetoric and victim-blaming are either being selective in the truth they write or have become selectively blind to it.

As an example of the depths I've seen some sink to, I alerted on one post a few weeks ago that called for Hamas captives to be tortured in "medieval" ways. Just before then, the poster had posted in the same thread in favour of torturing Hamas captives as some sort of deterrent. When challenged on this on the grounds of illegality and the fact that torture has proven ineffective, he doubled down and said that was because it hadn't been savage enough, and his solution was to go "truly medieval". Both replies stood for a couple of days before my nagging conscience led me to alert on the worse reply. It was a sort of test of DU, fair or not. My alert was upheld. As far as I know, the earlier reply that called for plain old torture still stands. If anybody else alerted on it, it must have been allowed to pass by the jury

This is on a site that sprang into life on the back of Bush's stolen election and weathered the years of wrongheaded conflict in Afganistan and Iraq, where I believe widespread horror and anger was expressed at the systematic torture dealt to prisoners in those wars.

There's an old adage: Be careful who you choose as an enemy, or you may grow to resemble them.

I don't know whether this reply is going to attract any attention at all, or even be alerted on and hidden as unacceptable in some way. It would be nice if any responses didn't just confirm my earlier experiences described above and my long-held stance of not arguing about Israel-Palestine on American forums. I give notice that my ignore finger is itchy if it leads to any personal attacks. Life's too short.

Column: We don't know how Israel's military is using AI in Gaza, but we should

Column: We don't know how Israel's military is using AI in Gaza, but we should

For those who aren't Twitter-averse here's the video from David Nugent-Malone's Twitter feed:

Why the MSM keep on slipping up on Gaza/Israel [Threadreader version of Twitter thread]

This is the Threadreader version of a Twitter thread linked at the end of this OP:

Well, a couple of weeks ago I alerted on a post that called for the torture of Hamas captives.

Another DUer challenged this by pointing out torture had been tried in the past and was not only illegal but unproductive, at which the poster I alerted on expanded on this vehemently by saying what they'd tried wasn't enough, and he meant "truly medieval torture."

Those posts stood for two days before I finally decided to alert on the second one, which I was then glad to see was hidden, or I'd have lost a lot of faith in DU. The first slightly less objectionable post still stood the last time I looked - I left it as I felt the poster, who regularly crops up on threads about Israel/Palestine and is vociferous in support of Israel, should own it. That poster certainly hadn't thought better of the first post, having gotten a hide, and deleted it.

I didn't post about this till now as I generally feel that's against forum etiquette and the jury result is enough and should be the end of the matter, but if we're sharing objectionable material we've found on DU, then why not?

A couple of minor (I hope!) changes that would greatly improve my DU4 experience

The main one is that I'd like to see the "Your Posts" button reinstated, separated out from "My Stuff".

On DU3, when it lit up, it was a very useful cue that someone had engaged with one of your posts and you had the option to read and reply.

In the new format, it requires an extra click to access this among a large number of options. An extra click isn't going to kill me, but since you can't centre mouse-click to open "My Stuff" in a new browser tab, checking out why "My Stuff" has lit up and viewing post replies forces me away from whatever I was reading at the time.

There's space available to the right of the header of each whole-forum view, next to "About forum", to neatly accommodate an extra button.

A less crucial change, and maybe more tricky, is that I'd like to be able to customize what sub-forums appear in the upper left column on every screen. Currently, it just lists Latest Breaking News, General Discussion and The DU Lounge. I'd like to be able to add more options without having to subscribe to a subforum. For instance, I liked having Editorials & Other Articles available at a single mouse click on DU3. I've subscribed to that forum on DU4 so it's now easily available, but I don't need constant alerts about posts on it. I know I could have the "Navigate" tab permanently open to let me have one-click access again, but it takes up quite a lot of top-screen real estate and is more cumbersome.

Other than that, I'm pretty happy with the changes, especially using the trainer wheels of Skinner Mode!

An afterthought about that "Tartan Tory" thing

If you take a look at the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election results, you'll see they played out like this:

I don't think the "Tartan Tory" jibe will fly,

given how many councils in Scotland are being run by Labour/Tory coalitions, and how some Labour apparatchiks have even boasted on TV about doing this deliberately to keep the plurality SNP out of power in certain council areas.

In fact, Labour would be just as well keeping its trap shut in Scotland since every time it yaps, it shows its hypocrisy.

It was doing cartwheels over its recent by-election win with a candidate who'd resigned from the party a couple of years ago because of disagreements with party leadership over policies like the EU and the two-child limit for receiving benefits. Even after his hustings, an election campaign that saw many English Labour MPs visit the constituency, probably for the first and quite likely the last time, including Keir Starmer himself, and the result, I don't think anyone's any wiser whether Labour's sparkling new Scottish MP will follow the party whip or not - i.e. will he end up a hypocrite or a pariah?

Anas Sarwar, Labour's leader in Holyrood, himself is an utter hypocrite. He's been vocal in calling for large wage settlements in various recent disputes when he, a millionaire, benefits from shareholdings in his family's wholesale firm which refuses to pay its workers a living wage "because it's voluntary".

Cameron's been out of step with SNP policy for quite some time. She's not been alone in that, but seems to have navigated it very poorly indeed to the point where she was literally just about to be deselected by her local party before she turned coat.

Sunak was supposedly closely involved in coaching/poaching her because her discontent was absolutely no secret. There are even rumours she's been offered a seat in the Lords in the fulness of time. What's verifiable is that by changing party, rather than simply resigning and forcing a by-election as she originally threatened if she was deselected, she'll get a generous ex-MP's payoff when she ultimately loses the seat as a Tory.

Just a week or so ago before this all blew up, she was proclaiming her staunch commitment to Scottish independence, so I think we can be forgiven for taking anything she says with a large pinch of salt.

As for the loons on social media, I almost certainly have them blocked, along with the large and rabid bunch of arch-unionists and rightwingers, and it has to be said, the occasional Labour supporter, who seem to have an alarming amount of time on their hands and absolutely nothing constructive, or indeed truthful, to say, and some of the vilest lines in sinister trolling that anyone is likely to be able to find. Cameron better hope she doesn't fall foul of them or she will indeed have something to complain about.