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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
54m ago
I was not particularly thinking of actual Israelis, Ukrainians or Russians when making that list. All of those deflections could be sampled from a smattering of Western European and American gentiles, in defense of a team they chose to support. (Was @FtttG himself even Jewish, on that matter?) You could add Chinese/Uyghurs to the list as well, except that topic area has largely dropped from the public consciousness.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
· Edited 59m ago
Is this not just the general pattern of how everyone handles instances of violence (or, more generally, violations of something they claim to be a principle they hold when they actually don't) against an enemy? Pro-Israelis do the same thing about "Israeli military sniping women and children for sport" reports; pro-Ukrainians pulled it about North Stream, Ukrainian assassinations of their own opposition abroad, and whenever their own attacks hit civilians; pro-Russians could be seen pulling it in real time about the invasion of Ukraine itself, among others; and so on and so forth.
We are all by and large beasts wishing for peace and prosperity for our friends and misery and death for our enemies, and the pretense that there is any ethics or principles beyond that only serves to make us beastlier still, like the trope of the "why you hittin' yourself?" bully.
(On the other hand, of you are willing to forego treating your arguments, empathy and every other act of communication as soldiers, there isn't even any particular contradiction between being happy for the passengers and thinking Israel is in the wrong! You can cheer on both the Russian and the Ukrainian soldier cleverly dodging a drone, even though each act is sure to set back the cause of the respective other by a little and threading the needle to support both causes at once is hard. These are fellow humans; they fought to survive against stacked odds; by luck, quick thinking, skill and coordination, they managed to pull it off.)
I don't see as strong an effect as you seem to do - if you open German newspaper comment sections now, there are still people trying to inject conspiracy theories about how the Nord Stream bombing was really a Russian false flag, and they are not falling behind your median Mossad tale in complexity. Whatever difference there still is, in terms of the complexity hostile conspiracy theories impute to Israeli plots, can surely be explained by the Israelis and their cheerleaders themselves cultivating an image of superhuman competence and non-pickiness of means. Surely the idea that they recruited Hitler's former right hand man to assassinate Germans working for their adversaries would have been in the class of conspiracy theories you would call out the ridiculousness of, had they not publicised it themselves.
Because they require continued Western backing, if not for the genocide itself then at least to sustain their long-term economy and strategy. I can't think of any historical precedent for the general configuration that necessitates this strategy, where an overwhelming global hegemon's actions are constrained by a somewhat well-informed population's perceptions of morality - the window perhaps opened with Vietnam, and is now closing as tribalism and consensus-manufacturing tech are catching up. Any candidate examples would therefore have to be putative genocides, by nations the US could be expected to intervene for or against, in the last 50 years. That's not a big pool, and what there is is largely still hot culture war material that it's impossible to analyse dispassionately.
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