Israel is under no extremely urgent (ie advancing enemy army) pressure to retreat, so mass graves of executed dead Gazans with their hands tied behind their backs left where the UN can find them seems very unlikely. That said, and as you suggest, it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government?
Even though Israel is a rich country, it’s small by first-world standards with only 9.5 million inhabitants. The US or China could intern a few million people, Israel can’t. The population of Gaza is a quarter of Israel’s, it would be like the US permanently occupying a country of 80 million people extremely hostile to America in every way (far more than the Germans or Japanese were to Americans, or arguably even the Afghans and Iraqis were) for deeply ingrained ethnic and religious reasons.
I would hesitate to say that Arabs will never accept being ruled by Jews, since 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, but occupying Gaza permanently would put a severe and probably unsustainable strain on Israel’s finances.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
2rafa
22d ago
Legal drugs is just because of federal policy though, right? If Congress repeals the federal weed ban tomorrow, it’ll be sold at Walmart and CVS in months. The reason weed is still a shady business is because banks can’t do business with them because the feds say it’s still illegal, they just don’t enforce the law against states that have legalized.
2rafa
7d ago
Articles getting longer is a long term thing; read old newspapers from 100 years ago and a lot of news stories for smaller things were the length of tweets today, just very small box paragraphs of text.
2rafa
12d ago
Yeah, that’s pretty much it, there were a few thousand left between Israel and New York, a few thousand in Britain and the Netherlands together, smaller numbers scattered in some other countries. A remnant population survived in Hungary that left for Israel in 1956, and there were some in the Soviet Union who survived the holocaust. But it’s fair to say likely 90%+ of Hasidic and Litvak Orthodox Jewry was killed in the Holocaust.
Since the 80s a lot of ‘mainstream Orthodox’ Jews and even some secular ones also changed to being ultra orthodox, and there was a purity spiral in Arab/Mizrachi Jewish circles in Israel that led to them adopting a lot of Hasidic customs.
Lastly the Chabad ‘Rebbe’ (Schneerson) became a figure of great importance to the vast majority of religious Orthodox Jews in the late 20th century and he was also responsible for a lot of the Baal t’shuva movement of increasing observance. So what was once a whole spectrum of Judaism with many varying gradations of practice has essentially separated into secular/reform/conservative judaism, “mainstream” and modern orthodox movements which are closely related to religious Zionism, and then ‘ultra orthodoxy’.
2rafa
18d ago
Ashkenazim are genetically a mix between Jewish paternal and Italian maternal DNA. The origin population is theorized to be Jewish traders who moved to Italy under Roman rule and married Italian women whom they converted to Judaism.
Some Ashkenazim have small amounts of German or Frankish genetic ancestry, but significant Slavic ancestry is quite rare except in recent ex-Soviet immigrants to Israel of questionable halachic status (and that intermarriage occurred within the past century).
The European populations most similar genetically to Ashkenazi Jews are Sicilians and others who have a mixture of Italian and semitic/near East genetics.
2rafa
21d ago
I fully sympathize with Ukrainian exiles, there’s no way I’d have stuck around if I was Ukrainian.
That said, I also sympathize with Zelensky, who is largely doing what his people seem to want him to. If the US or Western European countries were also defending in total war against a larger invasion force I’d imagine similar measures would be implemented here. We should be grateful that is unlikely for now.
I also think that Putin knows he’s winning and is thus unlikely to agree to a peace that is anything less than catastrophically punitive and for which Zelensky would be killed or exiled and blamed for generations by future Ukrainian nationalists.
2rafa
24d ago
By ‘Google interview question’ I mean the historic kind that made Google a famous interviewer in the early 2000s where they’d ask how many pizza boxes could fit under the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever and see how you reasoned your way through the question.
2rafa
26d ago
and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then
I don’t mind you linking back to this post since it is one of your best and I very much agree with it, but to some extent this is just cope.
The very same people who are upset they missed out on high school are - as you point out - also the people who:
“don’t have the spirit and agency to do them later.”
True enough, but those people often missed out on having fun in high school for exactly the same reason they aren’t capable of ‘catching up’ today.
It gets rare with age, but certainly in every major metropolitan area there is a substantial minority of adults well into middle age hooking up, partying and living a low responsibility lifestyle. Sure, it may be worse of more cringe than 18 year olds doing it, but that isn’t the primary issue these people have.
The core emotion is inward, it’s self hatred not because they never did, but because they never could have. If they went back to being 16 now with their current personality, they’d end in the same place in the social stack. “I regret not partying in high school” should actually be “I regret not being the kind of person who would have partied in high school”.
This isn’t coming from a popular person sneering at nerds perspective either, since (possibly like yourself) I led a largely dull and chaste high school life. But that’s because of who I am, not because of what happened to me.
2rafa
29d ago
smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory
Hate to tell you this but smart Russians also work in insurance, investment banking and tech companies, whether at home or (increasingly, as the brain drain accelerates) abroad.
I agree. In Kenya, half-white people are seen as ‘Mzungu’ - white - by natives. Meghan Markle and Barack Obama would be ‘white’, albeit of African descent. Half black kids in Britain have a separate racial category (mixed race), they’re seen neither as white nor black (which is why people were confused when Markle was considered black by the American press). The reason why the author thinks that African genes are ‘dominant’ is that when, say, your white friend (or indeed just another white person in your community) has a half-black kid, the aspects of their appearance that look different from you stand out much more. That’s the same reason a Kenyan would consider, say, Hakeem Jefferies to be white.
2rafa
2d ago
I think there are so many overlapping drivers of pro-Israel sentiment in the “ratsphere” (many Jews, the scene was largely founded by Jews, respect for Jewish inventions, Israelis as disproportionately active in tech/AI research, general dislike for religious Muslims, contempt for wokeness, dislike of student protestors) that it would seem unlikely for there to be any significant number.
The three core predictors of support for Palestine vs Israel are being Muslim, being leftist/‘woke’ and having a broadly low opinion of Jews. I’ve never met a strongly anti-Israel person who fell into none of those three categories.
2rafa
8d ago
2rafa
10d ago
I find him interesting personally. He’s a troll to some extent, I think he was literally fifteen or sixteen when he started doing it and it was essentially reading out smug /pol/posts in front of a camera. The issue for him now is that he can’t do anything else, there is no off-ramp for him, and competition in the DR grift-verse has intensified dramatically, so he’s kind of stuck. I think the difference between him and a lot of other people in the same space is that he didn’t really have time to develop much personality as a young man beyond his internet persona.
If you mean intellectually, if you’re here probably not, his content is essentially boilerplate /pol/ third-worldist collage posting and his voice and shock jock radio host affect are (in my opinion) annoying, like a very smarmy teenager’s. If you’re interested in those views they can be restated with more complexity in all the usual DR places online and a lot of what Fuentes does is rephrase this stuff for his zoomer audience anyway.
2rafa
20d ago
Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.
2rafa
20d ago
For sure, but it’s also ahistorical to say “none of them believed blacks and whites were actually equal”. Some, many even, did. There was a wide spectrum of positions on the subject.
2rafa
21d ago
Modern communities aren’t really set up for adults to socialize with friend groups every night. I wish they were (I think this was part of the appeal of Friends and to some extent Cheers). If you’re spending time by yourself or with a partner then - assuming you don’t have the energy for exciting activities - you are indeed just going to be consooming entertainment much of the time. I don’t think that’s so bad, and I agree that TikTok isn’t necessarily much worse than just watching TV, although I allow for the possibility that it reduces attention spans in a dangerous way (as yet unproven).
2rafa
22d ago
If you were exiled to Siberia in 1880 you couldn’t just be a homeless bum in Moscow or St Petersburg, presumably.
2rafa
24d ago
Sure, but he was always politically a libertarian. He lobbied against banning Holocaust denial on Facebook until it became politically untenable for example because he believes in freedom of speech. I don’t think he’s very political, that means both that he’s not a lib and that he’s not going to sacrifice huge money for conservative causes like Elon. Plus he’s a Jewish guy with half-Asian kids so that likely sets an upper bound on how rightist he might go.
2rafa
1d ago
Most of those things are discussed pretty regularly here. Others are just uninteresting. Another dissident right personage turns out to be Jewish? At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when). Big price rises in the US, particularly in service (stuff like fast food etc) are just due to labor shortage related pay increases for the poorest workers since 2020, they’re not hugely interesting. Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term. Eurovision being gay and weird, really? (Also this was literally a discussion last week).
If you have a good idea, make a top-level comment.
2rafa
9d ago
Yeah, there was a recent interview with Trump about a lot of this stuff and he seemed pretty uncommitted. If you read this the author is entirely hysterical, but the substance is thin. A lot of what Trump appears to promise is actually him just repeating and agreeing with the question he’s being fed; “oh, Mr President, are you sure you’re really going to deport all 12 million illegals and put them in deportation camps and use the military?” “Yeah, sure, we gotta do it, sure”. KellyAnne Conway, that avatar of competence, says earnestly that he’s going to move a lot faster this time. We shall see. I think much of Trump’s personal attention will be devoted to trying (and likely failing) to prosecute people he believes have wronged him. So it really depends on his advisors.
2rafa
19d ago
I think the main reason is that Portugal’s population was much smaller than the big Western European powers (especially England) and so they were quickly supplanted in Asia. The second golden age happened well after the 16th century and was finished off by the great earthquake and subsequent war.
Portuguese do have more sub-Saharan African ancestry than other European peoples (iirc around 2.5%) because of African slavery in places like Madeira and domestically in Lisbon before they started large scale plantations in Brazil, but their PISA scores are comparable to other European countries with much lower percentage SSA DNA, so I don’t think the reason for their decline can be expressed primarily in HBD terms.
2rafa
20d ago
I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
I have seen a lot of centrist Dem members of my own family become Trump supporters over the last 6 months because of this. None are hardcore leftists, mostly suburban Long Islanders and Chicagoans, and there were already a few Republicans in my family before 10/7, but I think you underestimate the shift happening in many Jewish American families. We’ll see what happens in the election, but I do think there will be a noticeable shift among Jewish voters.
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