It’s a big bureaucracy and procurement often just means going to the private sector and scooping up what’s on sale.

Non-zero chance the Koreans are running around with explosive pagers in their pockets right now.

It’s expensive because it has to go through a dozen layers of private contractors.

The US military was remarkably good at rapidly churning out cheap, effective armorments during the WW and early Cold War era. But the LBJ/Nixon pivot to private industry eroded all the efficiency. Then Reagan kicked military spending into overdrive in the 80s, and it’s been a snowball of waste, fraud, and embezzlement ever since.

Now the model for military procurement is just a jobs program for Congressional districts. The epitome of the Do Nothing profession.

Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate

Remind me again why you’d want an Apple (made in China) or OnePlus (made in China) or any of the other 70% of all cell phones available in the US? Are you just a big fan of paying extra for the same technology?

Or are you more wedded to phones made in Malaysia, India, or Vietnam for some peculiar reason?

you don’t put the cheapest solution in place

No shortage of high end Huawei models. They’ve been competitive with Samsung for nearly a decade.

Where should Israel go back to then?

Israel doesn’t have to go anywhere. No more than South Africa went somewhere after Apartheid ended in that state. Or Cuba vanished after the Batista government collapsed. Or Germany vanished after '45.

But the war criminals leading the current genocidal policy towards the people in their care. They need the same treatment as Milosoviec, Omar al-Bashir, and Saddam Hussein.

Drag Netanyahu to the Hague and prosecute him for crimes against humanity. Dismiss the current illegal and unconstitutional Kinesset and hold new free and fair elections in Israel. Provide reparations for the displaced Gaza and West Bank citizens, and launch a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to recover damages for the crimes committed against them.

That is the only moral path forward for Israel.

they could’ve easily just targeted specific individuals

They did target a specific individual - the Iranian ambassador in Lebanon. Everyone else was collateral damage.

Bombing a police station because there’s a chance one of the cops might try to arrest me.

Bombing the court house so there’s no place for my trial.

Bombing the mayor’s Special Committee On Investigating City Bombings to cover my trail.

Bombing the local field office of the newspaper that’s writing a report on all these bombings.

More people are saying I’m the bad guy, but this is just adding the number of people I have to add to my list of future bomb targets.

Once again, it needs to be noted that this entire operation was designed to assassinate one guy. The part of the pager shipment was an order made by the Iranian consulate in Lebanon.

Since the Israelis didn’t know which pager was going to the ambassador, they just rigged them all to explode. Then everyone who got caught in the crossfire was labeled “Hezbollah” after the fact.

even though they’re (trying to) occupy the exact same plot of land

Explaining to my Cherokee friends that, really, you’re no better than the European settlers who displaced you because you both wanted to live in Florida. Suddenly, they’re not my friends anymore. Can’t believe they were anti-white racists the whole time.

Wait till they start dropping the big bombs. Then it’ll be even less like terrorism and you’ll be called antisemitic for suggesting otherwise.

who was in a car with a Hezbollah member

“How do you know he was a member?”

“He must have been a member because he was using a pager”

Perfect impenetrable circle of logic.

Then there would be news articles about mass civilian casualties

You’re literally posting under one of them.

Distributing bombs to terrorists

What if you distribute bombs to Lebanese civilians, detonate them, and then label the corpses “Terrorist” after the fact?

10 year old girl clearly was in a right wing terrorist group.

This is what Israelis actually believe

In an episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, which aired three weeks ago, host Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

He claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same.

Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories.”

“Because that’s the reality we live in, it’s us or them, and it has to be them,” Weinstein said.

He added that Israelis want “full-scale war.”

Oh man, the bill to go to war with China would have been ratified in milliseconds.

Frustrating to do another long-form argument of “actually, when you distribute a bunch of explosives and set them off in crowded areas, you’re not fighting terrorism but doing terrorism”

For some reason people struggle to believe flinging hand grenades into a crowd is bad public policy when a US ally does it.

I guess better late than never. Although, I do begin to wonder how much of this is in response to Israeli’s tax base getting eviscerated by the war

That’s not true. Pagers are still in regular use for two reasons:

• Hospitals hate upgrading their tech infrastructure, so they’ll sit on a 20 year old system until it falls to pieces

• Pagers don’t get spam texts at the same volume as cell phones, so you can be confident that when your pager rings its serious and not automated solicitations.

I have not seen a doctor with a pager in a long time

My friend’s a pulminologist and his hospital still uses pagers. They just never bothered to upgrade their 20 year old system to use SMS. And he says he’s partial to it, because he’s not forced to check his phone every time it rings when 99% of the messages are spam texts anyway.

The articles keep repeating “Hezbollah”, but the target of the attack appears to have been the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.

Much like the US bombing of an Iraqi airfield to kill the Iranian diplomatic delegation to Baghdad, this appears to be an entirely illegal and recklessly deployed assassination plot aimed at one guy. The thousands of injuries and the eight dead (at least two being children under the age of 11) are just collateral damage the IDF has once again blanket-tagged as “Evil Muslim Militants”.

Love to just have an endless wall of lies injected into every social media site.