I know I already thanked you above for apologizing Kaiser Wilhelm, but thanks again. Whew, finally done with this thread. Still haven’t checked out any other articles for a couple of days now. I hope to see some pure coin comments when I do. Hopefully everyone is still getting along on all the other articles.

If the words apply they are all right to use, but I am not a fan of memes here myself. For many of them, only a minority here will find them amusing. Hard to find one that will not offend someone. The one above has no nutritional value in this usage.

As Kaiser Wilhelm insulted your side first this time, I will let your comments pass without any comment from me.

I am sure you already know you should have left the DAR part out, but I am mentioning it anyway now to be fair and thorough.

I agree about the meme Salivate Metal, but unsurprisingly have some things to say about the rest.
Overwhelmingly pro-Hamas? I do not think so. Rather a broad brush, don’t you think? A small minority is more like it. For example, in a Newsweek article titled “Full List of Lawmakers Who Voted to Block Funding for Israel “from Oct 10th, 2023 they said: “Iron Dome funding was last brought up for a vote in 2021 when Congress overwhelmingly voted to appropriate an additional $1 billion to the defense system. However, some members of Congress opposed the funding. Eight Democrats and one Republican in the House voted against the funding, while one Senate Republican blocked a vote on funding for months.” It appears about 4% of Democrats in the house voted in 2021 against funding for Israel and none in the Senate. I have not seen any later votes but I assume the numbers have not changed much as of today. I will pay attention the next time I see aid for Israel come up for a vote. Hardly overwhelming support for Hamas. Biden has voiced full support for Israel since this started. And if you notice, the Republicans in Congress were not at 0%. Looks like the one Republican in the Senate did more damage than all the members from both parties in the House that voted against the aid combined. How could Hamas be worse than the Nazis, has Hamas killed 6 million Jews? They are both terrible, but Hamas is not in the Nazis league by a long shot. It is like the difference between an amateur and professional team. I also read recently somewhere that Netanyahu over time had weakened the Palestinian Authority and strengthened Hamas for some political reasons. I think the article said because the PA was for the two state solution while Netanyahu is not, he weakened the PA. Not sure how true that is, but if it is true it looks like he miscalculated. I am just an ignorant American of European heritage so I am sure I am missing some things about this issue but I think European countries caused this problem by taking the land from the Palestinians in the first place. I had read they had been there for hundreds of uninterrupted years at that point. I do not think they had much say in the matter, plus do you think they were fairly compensated or were they just simply evicted? The problem as I see it is that Israel is not blameless, either. The Gaza Strip appears to me to be almost a concentration camp. I have trouble understanding how they can stomach doing that to another people after the way the Nazis treated them. I also read recently that more than 40% of the population in Gaza are children. They have no blame in any of this. Do you think that any kids that survive the current violence in Gaza will grow up with a good attitude towards Israel or a bad one? It is hard enough to calm things down here when simple insults start flying, it would be immeasurably harder if people you know were killed.
How do you think you would feel if someone kicked your own grandparents off their land 75 years ago? Would you say
“enjoy!” and move on or would you feel some resentment that they stole your inheritance out from under you? The longer resentment is allowed to fester, the worse it will get. What if they also restricted your freedom of movement, limited your job opportunities and controlled which products you were allowed to purchase or sell? I have read that Israel does all those things. Would you feel friendlier or more angry towards them? How about education? Do you think education in Gaza is wonderful or pitiful? I know what I suspect.
Israel can continue using the Iron Fist method as they have been doing almost my whole life, but the violence will never stop until the Palestinians are treated better. And it will take a lifetime of effort, it will not have much effect for decades. There is too much resentment on both sides today. We didn’t reach this point overnight, it won’t be resolved overnight either. Just as I know we will lose our country if our two sides cannot talk to each other civilly, they will get nowhere until they can talk civilly to each other. Like I often see in America, people paint others with too broad a brush. Every Palestinian deserves death or every Israeli does. Can either side forgive the other at this point or are they doomed to endless conflict? Somebody someday will have to make the first move or this will never end until one side is completely wiped out. I am not sure that is even possible for either side, so that means endless conflict. The Nazis were the most successful and even they did not come close to accomplishing their goal (They killed about 1/3rd worldwide, about 2/3rds in just Europe). Many people believe the end justifies the means. I strongly disagree with that. We are still dealing with the effects of the 3/5th compromise of 1787 today. Implementing it put off violence at the time, but only until 1860. The founding fathers knew it violated the ideal of liberty that was so central to the American Revolution, but did it anyway due to pressure from the Southern slave holding States. It just punted the problem into the future. And we are still dealing with the effects today. I guess the Europeans felt the Jews deserved their own country after the way they were treated by the Nazis but trampled over the Palestinian claims to do so. Both sides have paid a heavy
price for that decision ever since, but it appears to me the Palestinians have paid more. They lost their homes, freedom, dignity, and every time there is violence, I have noticed around 10 Palestinians die to every Israeli.
I think it might be a bit early to celebrate the success of the Abraham accords and moving the embassy to Jerusalem, Salivate Metal. The reason the 4 presidents before him did not do it was because it was tantamount to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the land it captured in 1967. I doubt that consideration even entered Trump’s mind. Focused on the prize without contemplating the implications, perhaps. Considering the recent events over there, perhaps they were wise to delay. Time will tell if the violence settles down or if this is just the start. Is it tied to the accords, or just a coincidence? I heard some say that Hamas launched the initial attack to try to derail the accords. That some years have passed since the signing means nothing, not everything happens instantly. It seems to me we still have much more violence ahead of us since Israel is planning an attack into Gaza.
Here is a comment I saw on a website called jabberwocking.com made by samgamgee to an article titled “The war crimes of Hamas” by Kevin Drum on Oct 26th, 2023 that I thought was pretty good. I commented above I thought I read somewhere that Netanyahu had strengthened Hamas. samgamgee mentions something similar in his comment. I bolded it below.— “Of course folks are outraged at Hamas’ attack. Almost all Western media focuses exclusively on that. To the point that when someone tries to point out IDF attacks which they know are going to kill civilians, they’re accused of being ignorant, antisemtic, or don’t understand how it’s “justified”. No one is allowed to be outraged by Hamas’ action and IDF’s response. Get in line or you’re ok with what Hamas did.Hamas isn’t in the West Bank, but that hasn’t stopped the IDF or settlers from killing Palestinians there. Palestinian civilians are killed whether Hamas does something or not. Hamas exists in part because Israeli govt supported them in an effort to create disunity within the Palestinian community. The last thing they want is a singular unified authority.
There are many types in Israel. Zionist, non-zionist, and a mix of both. For much of their existence, the zionist have driven govt policy and it works from the basis that all Palestinians need to be removed and a “pure” Jewish state be the end result. By any means possible. Even involving the assassination of the Israeli PM.
When you treat a population as essentially prisoners this is the result. SAfrica’s apartheid state is a an excellent example. Everyone imagines Mandela as a gentle fatherly figure, but he was someone who after many peaceful protests were met with violence decided to call for fighting back. Predictably violence exploded across the country and he became a terrorist to the State. The ANC was in many ways no different than the PLO, Hamas, etc. The largest difference being the injection of religious extremism (Hamas) versus communism (ANC).
I see little hope for the Palestinians. No one really cares about them. Various Middle Eastern state only view them as a tool against Israel. The West falls in line behind Israel and turns a blind eye to anything “uncomfortable”. Eventually the Palestinians will be ground out of all their land and become another people who only exist as refugees.”
How accurate his statements are, I am not sure. I did not fact check anything he said, but he sounds like he knows of what he speaks as at least one of the things I read about somewhere else earlier he also brought up. Nothing stuck out to me as obviously wrong.

Hi Kaiser Wilhelm,
I see you already apologized for all these memes below (this one is particularly bad), so no more needs to be said. Thanks!

“But, we fought a war in part because of slavery, the only nation to do so. “—That’s a bad thing right? We were the only one where the majority could not agree slavery is bad without bloodshed.
“Many white privileged men fought and died to free black people they never met.“—From the North. I doubt there were many, if any from the South. Share your source. Absolutely nothing came up when I searched “wealthy southerners who fought for the north”. I know they couldn’t have fought for the South.
“Many block confederates fought and died WILLINGLY to preserve their way of life in the South. Yep, you read that correctly.“—Not according to what I found. From the Guardian, “Black Confederates: exploding America’s most persistent myth” Oct 13, 2019: “The American Civil War has never been in short supply of myths, but Levin describes black Confederates as the “most persistent”. Hundreds of articles, organizations and websites rewrite history by asserting that between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans volunteered as soldiers in an army fighting to preserve slavery.Just because it is counterintuitive does not make it true. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election and the white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee still stands, the issue resonates beyond the halls of academia.
Levin, a historian, educator and author of the blog civil war memory, has been writing on the subject since 2008.

“One of the things that I’m fascinated by is the extent to which Americans still struggle over coming to terms with the core issues of the civil war and reconstruction, and that is slavery and the issue of race,” he says by phone from Boston.
“This is, it seems to me, the perfect case study through which to track that memory of the war, whether it’s a matter of erasing slavery from the landscape of memory or mythologizing, which I think the black Confederate narrative, at least in the last few decades, is really just a perfect example of.”
Levin’s new book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, argues that slavery was central to the south’s war effort. Drawing on research including letters, diary entries and newspaper editorials, it demolishes the notion that the Confederacy embraced black men as soldiers from the beginning of the war.

After war broke out in 1861, thousands of enslaved men were forced to accompany their masters into the army as body servants or camp slaves.
“It’s absolutely important to think of these enslaved men as the cornerstone or foundation of any Confederate army because it’s their presence, it’s the roles that they’re playing, that make camping, marching and conducting battles even possible,” Levin says.
Life in the camps could be harsh. Levin “found a couple of cases where the punishments are brutal. One Confederate officer wrote home to his wife in vivid detail about stretching out his camp slave and laying on 400 lashes. The kinds of punishments that you would have found back home on the plantation, you would have found all of that present in the army.
“It may have even been heightened because you have to remember most of these men who bring camp slaves are officers, so they have to constantly demonstrate their rank.””
Here is more about it from Wikipedia: “For the Confederacy, both free and enslaved black Americans were used for manual labor, but the issue of whether to arm them, and under what terms, became a major source of debate within the Confederate Congress, the President’s Cabinet, and C.S. War Department staff. In general, newspapers, politicians, and army leaders alike were hostile to any efforts to arm blacks. The war’s desperate circumstances meant that the Confederacy changed their policy in the last month of the war; in March 1865, a small program attempted to recruit, train, and arm blacks, but no significant numbers were ever raised or recruited, and those that were never saw combat.”
“Also, there were black slave owners in the South.“—Not a lot, but True. Also from Wikipedia: “Despite the long-standing American color line, there were Black slave owners in the United States, some in cities and others as plantation owners in the country. Slave ownership signified both wealth and increased social status. Black slave owners were relatively uncommon, however, as “of the two and a half million African Americans living in the United States in 1850, the vast majority [were] enslaved.”” and “In 1830, there were 3,775 black (including mixed-race) slaveholders in the South who owned a total of 12,760 slaves, which was a small percentage of a total of over two million slaves then held in the South.” I think that figure represents about 1/5th to 1/6th of 1% of the Blacks in the nation at that time. You were saying in your earlier AWQ post to me that Juliette Gordon Low barely proved my point. Should I tell you the same? Mine was 1 out of 5. That is 20%. In my book, a win is a win slim or not.
“States rights was the main cause of the War between the states, or the war of Northern aggression from the Southern point of view.“—-Both of those are what the South called the Civil War. From History.com, 5 Myths About Slavery. Updated June 23, 2020: “Myth #2: The South seceded from the Union over the issue of states’ rights, not slavery.”: “This myth, that the Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolina’s delegates cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed Black men to vote. 
As James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, wrote in the Washington Post: “In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights—that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.” The idea that the war was somehow not about slavery but about the issue of states’ rights was perpetuated by later generations anxious to redefine their ancestors’ sacrifices as noble protection of the Southern way of life. At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union.”” So, don’t pigeonhole the morals and standards based on your narrow minded and bigoted viewpoint.“—Back at ya. I count 3 of your statements as factually incorrect, 1 no info, and 1 correct. You know, I believe anyone can hold any opinion they want, but if you intend to share yours with others here as fact perhaps it would be worth doing a quick search to verify you are sharing information, not misinformation.
“Yes, even today given the senile and corrupt and pathetic installed president we have now. We are greater than any one man or excuse for one. “Let’s Go Brandon, I agree” – Joseph ROBinette Biden“—Did we really need this? You could have ended with “America is the greatest country in the world!” and you would have still made your point just as well. Kaiser Wilhelm did not end his comment with a closing bashing of Trump. This is a coin site and one that people of all types visit.
I have said this to others before, so don’t feel bad about it—This is not RepublicanCoinNews.net or DemocratCoinNews.net it is just CoinNews.net.
I cannot stomach closing all or many of my comments with a political insult just to show you but I hope you would agree you would get tired of seeing me bash Trump every time I commented pretty quickly, wouldn’t you? We two know how you feel politically and if you want to let others know in the future where you stand I am sure you can do it more subtly and respectfully. I am sure a like minded individual would pick up on your hints. I do not mind talking about any subject here, but I do mind if it does not remain civil and respectful. Just like I expect you feel insulted when someone bashes Trump, others will get insulted when you bash Biden. Thanks. I have enjoyed your comments mostly. As I mentioned earlier today in another of my posts, I learned a few new things from our chat. If nobody here has welcomed you yet, let me thank you for sharing your comments with us here. I am looking forward to seeing some of your coin related ones. I am curious what types you collect.
Another good thing to mention: Someone not too long ago commented they would like to be able to share this site with their kids, but could not because of the toxic political arguing going on. This has been far more civil than those were (around a month or two ago) so you have nothing to worry about but it is a good thing to keep in mind. I do not have kids so it had never crossed my mind before he mentioned it. Take care, Salivate Metal.

Good comment, Kaiser Wilhelm. It is hard to fault people for trying to make sure our actions match our ideals. None of us were the ones that laid out our founding principles. If they never intended us to live up to those ideals then maybe they never should have written them in the first place. I believe at least some of them fully intended for us to live up to those ideals someday even though they knew they were not living up to them at the time. Others hoped to remain in the 1950s, errr 1750s.

“I am most painfully aware that I can’t even begin to hold a candle to you when it comes to the best way of dealing with your garden variety right wing extremist ideologues.“—Anyone, really. Just remain calm and speak factually as much as possible. Leave insults out of it. Even if they insulted you initially unless they continue in which case show them how it feels to be on the receiving end for a change (1:1 ratio remember. Don’t waste ammo). Sometimes the only way people learn empathy is by experiencing the same thing themselves. I wish it did not have to be that way. Ok, even I know it doesn’t. If we were a nation of voracious readers, we would also be a nation of empathy. I read so many stories of “others” I actually do not have to go through the same experience before I can feel sympathy for someone. In almost all cases. I still have some blind spots. Everyone does.
“You not only have an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, including pertinent quotes, dates and essential facts and figures,“—-I am generalist. I know a little about almost everything. Just enough to know what or when I need to look something up online. I must have read at least 1000 books in my life (Mostly fiction. I own about 500 hardbacks, and a large number of paperbacks I have never counted, plus all the books I read from the local libraries when I was a teenager) and countless magazines and articles in newspapers (in the past) and online (today). Believe me, it takes quite a bit of time for me to churn out those monster posts in response to someone else’s political rants. They do not care if what they say is true, I try very carefully to make sure it is, and show why I believe it to be so. That is usually where the Right Wing side fails. Actual, provable facts are not often on their side. I see there is a saying about that. “Facts lean left”. I sure hope some other people step up someday to keep this site civil, I will not be around forever. While this one is a bit long, it did not take me much time at all since I did not need to fact check any of my or others comments here.
“Consequently, I’ve decided to heed my innermost impulse to step aside, thereby allowing you, the unmatchable master of your ultimately persuasive debating and brilliantly revealing debunking craft, go more freely and independently about your business.“—No problem, Kaiser Wilhelm. I told you last time, you don’t need to join in. Just remain your uplifting and encouraging self for all the (civil) visitors here, like you have always been. Thanks for all the kind words, and thank you for all your contributions to this site over the years. I have always enjoyed seeing your comments here. If you pass on before me, I will miss your presence here Kaiser Wilhelm. I am around 15 years younger than you, but we all know that doesn’t mean you will necessarily go first. As far as I know, I am still healthy.
Take care. Nice chatting with you again.

One the bright side, this is an old article now and there is still a good number of coin comments at the top before you hit this conversation. I haven’t even looked at any other articles for a couple of days now. Hope the rest of the site is still civil. I noticed Craig and Dazed and Coinfused had a comment a few days ago but I did not look at them. I (think I) am glad Dazed and Coinfused didn’t leave permanently, I think without all the political insults he can share some good insights with us. Him and Salivate Metal seem similar to me so far for some reason.