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Scottie's Playtime 
Also this commenting business is much different than it was last time I gave you links here. Just saying. Gotta love WP (and I do.)
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Hello Ali. By my dogs that love gravy, if WordPress doesn’t stop messing with the comment boxes it will make reply to comments or even making them impossible. On my blog if I try to reply there to a comment my spell check won’t work in the new comment box they put up. Again they are trying to design everything to work with phones, which have their own spell check system, but for some reason it disables my computer programs. To use my spell check I have to either write the comment, copy it, open the programs, change the misspellings, then copy it again, go back to the reply and paste over the one I wrote with the new one. So right now I try to reply from the small box on the bell notification. But when I leave a comment on other blogs my spell check works, it is only replying to comments on my own blog I see the different box. Thanks for the link. Hugs. Scottie
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That seemed to be a one-off; yesterday things worked just fine! I’m blaming it on internet anomalies. Sounds good, right? I like using the bell notifs, too, though sometimes I need the context. Many times I comment directly on a post while I’m reading. It almost always works fine, but for this one, I was worried I’d broken it. It looked ok when it loaded, though.
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Hi Ali. I am finding it is hit or miss today as I comment on blogs. Some bring up that hated block editor block, and some open the normal one that we all like. I don’t know what to do. I think WordPress wants to push it all that way, they told me in chat support years ago their goal of the company was to be completely business oriented and smartphone usable, because that is where the young workers who they think have the money to buy. I hate it. But how do we fight back. It is getting to the point where even keeping a blog on their platform is too costly. Hugs. Scottie.
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The horrifying scenario plays out again.
The one which has been enacted over and over and over again.
Take a random place. 1970 and say the Chapter starts there.
Folk desperate. Folk angry. Folk frightened. And the security forces react. A continuing story, played out on many a stage.
But what happened here?
I mean what happened down there on the trigger side of the gun.
Did we see fear?
Rage at the initial October attack by Hamas?
Did someone believe they saw Hamas troops in the crowd?
Did someone just not care so long as they shot a Palestinian?
Did someone just shoot and the rest followed?
Did there come bursting forth a visceral thousand year old race memory. ‘You will not kill us again. Die all of you!’?
From there on in the possibilities and combinations are myriad.
Hate and Anger will justify anything. Anyhow. Anywhere. Any Time.
Not that the Dead, Dying, Injured or Survivors concern themselves with the cause. They just felt the bullets, saw family, friends, neighbours fall.
Somewhere there sat crying children looking at sightless eyes, seeing men in uniform firing, at them. Children who will grow into adults and will not forget that once more Israelis killed more Palestinians.
Children who will seek vengeance. If they do carry it out it will be unlikely it was anyone who fired that day.
Thus another addition to a Chapter written in blood.
It was always a tough act to survive but in that 1000 year old fear a nation continues to write its own doom.
The Scales of History weigh heavily against Israel, it has too many foes and its one dependable backer The USA is cracking at the seams. Its governments over the decades have condemned its peoples to an era of a sharper blind alley fear. It will take others down with it of course.
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Hello Roger. And the cycle continues. I agree with all you wrote. But the more entrenched they create the hate, the hotter the flames of rage, the more determined to get revenge the survivors will be. Hugs. Scottie
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This is so Scottie.
Some wars flare up over miscalculations or poor policy, they die back and the survivors can think ‘What the hell was all that about?’ And as long as the governments are worn out too the ordinary folk will hopefully make peace with each other.
With others the hate and the distrust is generations deep, with massacre and counter massacre built in. This is so between Palestine and Israel. Unless there is some major shift within the international community we are witnessing a virtual fight to the death.
It is a region currently steeped in such.
In recent decades Jordan, Syria and Lebanon have seen similar, in those cases war-weariness played a part.
Between Palestinians and Israelis the feeling is visceral despite the efforts of a brave dogged few risking censure (or worse) by their own people.
There will be no winners, just survivors.
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Hello Roger. But sorry, no winners, just survivors …. That means we all lose. Sorry, but I can not see a way that works out for peace or reconciliation. It terrifies me if we only have a never ending revenge cycle.
But Roger once you showed me the cycle was broken. You often talked about the history of the Troubles. Then came … I think you called it the good Friday? I have to look that up, sorry, I have been up since 2 am and I am tired,
OK it took me some time, I remembered what you called it, but I had the name partly wrong. Good Friday Agreement
1998 peace pacts between the British, Irish, and Northern Irish governments to end the Troubles
See I do read / listen to what you write to me, but it is sometimes hard to remember it all. But remembering this may be more important than others. Because this was a time people put aside their own gains for peace for all.
Please tell me, no please explain how that is somehow possible in what is happening between Israel which is on a genocide, and the Palestinians which have seen decades of abuse? To my mind it is like asking slaves to forgive all the abuses of their cruel masters, the rapes and beatings and then live peacefully next to them. I just don’t know how it can happen. Plus I really think the Israelis don’t want it to happen. I just posted how groups of Israeli’s have already moved into to Gaza with no resistance from the military. Hugs. Scottie
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Hi Scottie.
Sorry for the delay – chores and ‘stuff’ (like trying to convince a phone and a laptop to talk to each other and transfer photos!).
Anyway.
Northern Ireland from my view point, and bear in mind my adopted ‘Home Town’ Birmingham where Sheila comes from was bombed by the IRA in 1974 with loss of life, so although we bear Irish folk no ill-will, The IRA is another and touchy subject.
But back to basics. ‘We’ on all sides got lucky. Despite what you might read in biased accounts the UK governments hung on in there. Eventually everyone apart from a few fanatics got war-weary. There was a general wish for the killing to stop (and most paramilitaries by then were also tied to criminal extortion and allied activities)
Eventually a peace deal was worked out. It took some time and there was great help from US senator George J. Mitchell who was sent by US president Bill Clinton to chair the talks.
One of the blessing being a wish on both sides to work it out.
Martin McGuiness (Republican politician and once IRA commander) and Ian Paisley (Ulster Unionist and once firebrand of the Protestant community) got on so well together they were known as The Chuckle Brothers (a reference to a British comedy duo of the time).
There’s still a tension, just below the surface. There always will be. Brexit screwed things up for a while. We all just hope.
Israel and Palestine is another case, and one which is even more steeped in blood and long, long history more than the 500 years of Northern Ireland.
If I was to write my opinion on a public site I would likely get howls of protests from both sides. Anyway. My take on things.
History has a long reach back, right to the Jewish revolt against the Romans in their First War 66-74 CE which led to something similar that you are seeing in Palestine today. This caused the Jewish Diaspora and many settled in Europe to face centuries of persecution, discrimination, pogroms and then WWII. Since the turn of the 19th / 20th century Jews had been moving into Palestine (then part of the ailing Ottoman Empire). Some feeling they could settle and work alongside the Palestinians, others hardened by the centuries thinking ‘it’s ours we’ll have it back’. Naturally the Palestinians who had lived there for generations and worked the lands had other views. Since the 1850s a Palestinian Identity was started to flourish. Britain and France for their own imperial reasons were involved and changing sides but never benevolent to either. From about 1900 the first communal violence started. After WWI both nations were allowed to carve up the Middle East and impose their governance. And the violence got worse. After WWII many surviving jews from Eastern Europe tried to get to Palestine as it was. Britain which had the mandate lost control of the situation and got out.
After that there was war after war. Each one reinforcing within the Israeli mindset that everyone was still out to get the Jews, this was their land in the first place and the world would have to put up with it. Since by the whims of political fate the USSR sided with the Arab states and US with Isarel (with Britain and France still dithering about the place from time to time) a Cold War proxy was set up there. Basically The West reckoning after WWII The Jewish folk needed a state, the Palestinians understandably very aggrieved at being cast out.
And so it has gone on, a visceral hatred burrowing deeper and deeper in. Both sides locked in, as they see it in a battle for survival. For the thirty years post WWII most western sympathy was for Israel. Over the past 60 there has been a sectional shift by many to pro-Palestinian (whether this a chance to give vent to a thousand year nascent White Race suspicion of Jews and appear respectable in doing so, is another matter and I might as well try and discuss Gun Control with the NRA).
Here Scottie we are seeing IT all played out again, two communities locked into violence that goes back generations. At some stage the boot could be on the other foot and you would see Israelis fleeing and being bombed out of their homes; History does that. There are political tectonic shift in which that could happen.
For a parallel you could look to Azerbaijan / Armenia where a similar history of bloody conflicts are going on.
How this will play out, it cannot be yet predicted. My present feeling is that current Israel has about another 50 years tops, because it seems as if the USA is intent of weakening itself from within and will not be a dependable backer.
This conflict tied in with others is all mess, a tangled bloody mess.
Take care you guys
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Hi Roger. You mentioned war weariness. But with the Israeli population not being able to hear anything negative about the war, how can they get weary of it. Like in Russia where it is illegal to say anything negative against the war against Ukraine, it is illegal in Israel to even show, broadcast, write about, or in any way talk about what is happening to the Palestinians and Gaza. The one teacher that tried to voice his opinion get put in jail and basically tortured for days, and then lost his job and is under house arrest. I played the interview with him on The Majority Report. Hugs. Scottie
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