The notion that there is no way that US or Israeli intelligence foresaw this coming war because they are supposedly so omnisciently brilliant suffers from a basic failure of human cognition. With increased technology, intelligence agencies and cops have gotten much better are uncovering enemy plans and catching criminals. But they still don’t know everything.
Humans are basically idiots so they think that with this increased intelligence, cops and spies turn into infallible Gods. “How could they not know?…how can they not catch him? The intelligence agencies/cops are incompetent.” However they’re not necessarily incompetent at all. The finest intelligence agencies and best police departments on Earth may not be able to uncover enemy plans or catch notorious criminals.
It also suffers from the American, “Fire them,” approach to all problems. I’ve noticed that Americans love the idea of firing people from their jobs. I suppose none of these idiots ever got canned. I’ve heard that over in Europe, firing is a last resort and is only resorted to after multiple warnings, etc. Also workers have a lot of protections from unfair firings.
I think Americans harbor an authoritarian mean streak. It’s probably due to the hypercapitalism we practice here, but it’s also due to our exceptional nature. Because we are exceptional and better than anyone else, we are therefore perfect and can’t make mistakes. Hence despite errare humana est, known since Antiquity, it’s mistakes = firings. Zero mistakes or errors are allowed the typical American worker.
This notion about spies and cops suffers from the “God effect.” We think intelligence agencies and cops are Gods. Why? Because we’re stupid!
“There’s no way the cops could not catch that evil killer!”
Oh, yes there is! As long as the cops are not Gods, there will be lots of people they cannot catch.
Same thing with the all-encompassing intelligence agencies. Sure, Mossad is good, but they have not a soul in Gaza or in Hamas, Hezbollah, or any of the major Palestinian groups. Nor do they have anyone deep inside Iran. These people have really good opsec.
As long as Mossad, etc. are not Gods, there will be things they cannot predict and people they cannot catch. They still can’t find Mohammad Deif in Gaza after decades of searching for him. They’ve been trying to kill him forever, and they’ve tried to kill him seven times, but he’s still alive. I’m not sure of his wounds, but I’ve heard he lost an eye and an arm and a leg. But you can still get around with those issues.
At one time they had a source inside Hamas who was giving them info about Deif’s whereabouts. This was the man the Jews claimed was killed for being gay. He wasn’t. He was killed for giving up Deif to Israel. Deif left that location only a hour before it was hit. The guy being gay was the blackmail Israel used to hook him in as a source.
I’m not even sure that Israel has good sources inside the Fatah splits like AMD or Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade. And there are so many of these little splits and grouplings now that there’s no way that they have people inside all of them. But Shin Bet has excellent intel inside the West Bank, I’ll give them that.
I’m planning to write a commentary post in a few days about 3 topics:
1) The situation of the Dollar Blue in Argentina. What they are doing in Argentina is quite similar to what they have been doing in Venezuela with the speculative dollar, and there is the same intention for political destabilization, as they are trying to destroy the Argentinian currency during the current presidential elections.
2) Related to the above, I forgot how it exactly worked but I will research it again. It’s about how some shadowy NGOs like Carnegie are responsible for designing, in an almost clinical way, far-right political candidates around the globe. Ever wondered why the likes of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Javier Milei are surprisingly alike? It’s because they are designed based on a very specific mold to appeal to disenchanted youth. Those populist candidates are portrayed as “anti-system” with a sophisticated pop campaign. Still, they work for the oligarchy that wants to ensure a puppet that will ensure their interests in whatever country they want to get a hold of.
3) I will try to find again a video I had. It showed two different far-right candidates in two different Latin American countries giving almost exactly the script in political discourse in their respective countries. Those were separate events but it shows how they had to follow very specific guidelines given by their benefactors.
By the way, If you are thinking about doing a mini post on the topic of the Israel conflict, you might want to cover the current propaganda/disinformation campaign, just like you did on the Ukraine war in the early phases of the conflict. It’s known that Hamas targeted not just military but also civilians for casualties and prisoners, but there is a MASSIVE push of a narrative about Hamas mass beheading babies. Of course, I couldn’t find graphic proof that this is the case. Same thing with stuffing kids in cages, that German girl with braids, raping women, and the usual techniques of using videos of Daesh or Israeli crimes and passing them as Hamas.
Will you mail it to me when you are done with it? I will post it when you are finished with it.
Also, what happened to your English? Did you run this threw an English grammar checker? Because damn your English just got a whole lot better in under a year.
I’m actually using a grammar checker, Grammarly to be specific. It helps me remove some redundant sentences and modify incorrect ones. For the most part, I’m just paying more attention when I write and the grammar checker tells me when I screw up something.
And sure, I will send the post as soon as I get it done.
Yeah! I thought so. It’s great. Your prose is a lot cleaner. Fewer misspellings and grammatical errors too.
Your English is interesting. Often it’s not really even wrong! And it isn’t really bad English at all. I know what bad English looks like. But it’s not good, clean English prose either. It’s more like…awkward. Sort of like, “We just don’t say it like that.” Sure, you can say it like you did, and it makes complete sense, but that’s not usually the way we phrase it, and it sounds sort of funny, weird, off, or strange. A number of your other sentences were not really awkward and they were also grammatical. It’s more that they could be said in a better, nicer, fancier way. There’s a way to write them to make them “roll” a little bit.
I edit a lot of my regular posters’ comments this way. They also do ungrammatical stuff with punctuation marks, but so many native English speakers mess up punctuation! I was messing it up myself until 5-10 years ago when my Mom finally showed me how I was using commas wrong in compound sentences. There are not a lot of native English speakers who get that comma rule down!
In my Linguistics classes, we used to put question marks by some really odd sentences. We would classify English sentences are either:
1. Grammatical. Abides by the rules.
2. Absolutely ungrammatical, just wrong. But even here you can often understand what the person was trying to say.
3. Apparently grammatical or correct, but just weird or odd. As in, “We just don’t say it like that.” The professor would put a question mark by those sentences.