Biden’s office announced his illness Sunday afternoon.

  • wpb@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Thank goodness he lives in a country where the cancer hospitals haven’t been bombed out of existence with weapons funded by the United States under the leadership of Joe Biden.

      • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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        5 hours ago

        Maybe it is downvoted because those weapons were funded long before Joe Biden was the leader?

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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          47 minutes ago

          The Leahy law requires that those weapons be withheld. But the party of letting bullshit procedure get in the way of doing the right thing doesn’t let actual law get in the way of doing the wrong thing.

        • wpb@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          But that’s factually incorrect. Billions of dollars of new US military aid to Israel, during the genocide, were okayed by the Biden admin. This is not controversial, this is not classified, this is public knowledge that made headlines in all major news outlets at the time.

    • banzhaff@feddit.uk
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      8 hours ago

      If he allowed terrorists to build command centres in those hospitals, and dig tunnels underneath, then perhaps they would have been bombed to the ground…

      • wpb@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        As another user pointed out, there’s no basis for those claims other than IDF press releases, which is literally the party that’s doing the bombing. Not crazy reliable. But let’s say they’re not lying, or wrong. Let’s say that enemy combatants are holed up underneath all schools, all hospitals, all churches and mosques, and 90% of residential buildings in Gaza (writing it out like this makes it sound really fucking stupid and unbelievable, but let’s entertain the thought anyway).

        In the case that medical facilities are used in acts harmful to you, they become legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law. However, when you do bomb such facilities you have a number of responsibilities, including preparing a contingency plan and getting full medical service (such as cancer wards, maternity wards, and so on) up and running as soon as possible. If you don’t, you’re right back in war crime territory. And Israel hasn’t.

        But aside from legal stuff, just ask yourself on a moral level if you’re okay with this. If your mother is taken hostage in a bank robbery, would you be okay with the police dealing with this situation by blowing up the entire building? I personally wouldn’t, but I guess it’s conceivable that you would respond by saying “the robber did the hostage taking, the cops had no other choice, and the only one to blame for my mother’s death is the robber”.

        All of this is all hypothetical of course because there’s actually no reason to believe that all hospitals, schools, places of worship, residential buildings, and refugee camps are all valid military targets. Because what moron would believe such a thing based entirely on what the party doing the bombing is saying?

        • banzhaff@feddit.uk
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          36 minutes ago

          I’m just pointing out how ridiculous the comparison is to the USA. Which, to my knowledge, is not a huge refugee camp riddled with terrorists.

          • wpb@lemmy.world
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            27 minutes ago

            Yeah, and you’re basing this on info from the IDF, which I and others point out is hardly an impartial observer. There are impartial third party observers (Amnesty, WHO, Red Cross, ICC, ICJ, Unicef, etc.) and they all disagree with you. Try applying a even a smidge of critical thinking.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        As a reminder, the claim that Hamas built a command center under Shifa Hospital comes solely from the IDF. They have rejected offers to have an international delegation of journalists freely roam the area to verify the claim.

    • Fiki_Fiki@lemmynsfw.com
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      13 hours ago

      That would have been a bummer, wouldn’t it? Joe Biden should have been ashamed of himself if he had allowed such a thing to happen under his leadership. Thank God he didn’t.

      • AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Oh weird, so it wasn’t a constant stream of weapons provided with stamped approval by the admin? It wasn’t that the only time they threatened to stop it was only a very specific type of heavy bomb, not any other munitions? It wasn’t the Biden admin who initially rejected the terms ceasefire until deep into the conflict? It wasn’t the Biden admins ceasefire plans that were accepted and abandoned by Trump, proving that if they had provided full throated support of those plans it could have very reasonably happened a year sooner?

        Best thing you can say about this fuck was that he was the white guy they used to get Obama elected, cause they figured no one would vote for him unless he had a token cracker.

        • Darbage@lemmy.today
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          7 hours ago

          Man, the criticisms are valid, and I’ll even add to them because his pride in not stepping down sooner doomed what shreds of american democracy were left. That said, the best and largest climate bill ever passed by the US govt happened under him. Unions were bolstered and grew under him (not the train workers tho lol) and if nothing else, his victory let me not think about the fat orange cow for ten minutes. In so many ways, I pity and even kinda miss that sad sleepy bastard-- however much he floundered in almost every way. As a bonus his dogs hated government agents as much as I do, and got to bite them with impunity.

          • AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Totally fair, despite the vitriol and glibness of my response. But man, as you mentioned the railroad was a big fuck up. Speaking of shitty situations for Palestinians… East Palestine Ohio happened like 2 months after he made the rail workers go back to work, and it was one of the exact problems they were striking for. That’s directly on his hands.

        • wpb@lemmy.world
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          48 minutes ago

          That’s a fair point, he was not compos mentis during the second half of his presidency. But then, suppose someone in the more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s gets behind the wheel and runs over and kills a child. Are they morally culpable? I think the answer is non-obvious, and at any rate subjective.

          For me personally, a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition is that the driver currently remembers what they did. This also implies that as time progresses, they lose culpability, as in time they will forget about it. It’s hard to judge whether Biden satisfies this. I mean, in his worst moments (like the debate, and his recent appearance on the View) it’s so obvious that he doesn’t understand what’s going on that I have a hard time believing he fully understands what’s happening in the middle east. This, to me, would imply that he’s not culpable for the genocide by virtue of simply not knowing it’s happening in the first place.