CriticalDuty
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User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
The Grauniad's readers are considerably more psychotic than their staff:
But what if Israel had not met horror with horror? What if, with restraint and dignity, it had mourned its dead, leaving the depravity and hatred of the Hamas project for the world to behold? What if the international community had learned the lesson of Iraq, and insisted that Israelis and Palestinians find ways to live side by side, or even, as they surely eventually must, together?
It's really not possible to talk to someone who thinks you could shame the Arab street into compliance by turning the other cheek and ignoring a major terrorist attack.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
There are US troops all over the region (including two carrier groups off the coast of Israel) and an extensive CIA presence. He's not just going in there defenseless. I doubt Hamas or al-Qaeda have the capability to shoot at Air Force One, and on the ground there's going to be US and IDF troops swarming all over the place.
It would be suicidal for Iran to try killing the US President, because it would make them global pariahs, and what few allies they still have would disavow them. They'd basically be greenlighting Lindsey Graham's fever dreams of flattening Tehran.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name, but it's so comically ominous. "There will be a Voice!" "We must consult the Voice!" "What will the Voice say?". Like something out of a Lovecraft story with a cult and an Old One.
I assumed the Yes campaign's insistence that the Voice would have no legal force was just a bad-faith position, as it's fairly easy to conceive of a dynamic where the Voice doesn't need legal force because it has the liberal media waiting to brand any government's disregard of the Voice as ipso facto evidence of racism, which will be used to declare that government's positions as morally illegitimate. When your enemy is campaigning to build a new weapon, don't vote to give it to him.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
Palestinian refugees attempted to overthrow the government of Jordan and take control of the Jordanian military, it was a pretty notable event in modern Arab history. Since then I think there's been some understandable reluctance from many Arab states to shelter the Palestinians. Egypt's military government overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood to take power, so I doubt they're eager to take in Hamas-friendly refugees who might bolster the ranks of the Ikhwan.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I don't mind it, honestly. But if some level of ethnic cleansing that falls short of total genocide would be an effective solution, then sure, go for that instead. It's worked out plenty of times in the past. What I object to is this idea that everything on that spectrum of atrocities, from population transfers to mass graves, should be declared off-limits.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
Yes, any war could be resolved by one side's unilateral surrender. Ukraine could end the war tomorrow too.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I don't think it's comparable, because the British weren't signing a treaty with the IRA. Ireland had a fully-developed spectrum of normal political parties and civil organizations, and they signed the Good Friday Agreement as a reflection of the overwhelming popular desire for peace. After that, any Irish group that wanted further conflict would lack a credible basis to do so. Who are you supposed to talk to in Gaza? Hamas is the only authority there, and the population's views are more aligned with Hamas than peace advocates would care to admit. Peace is nice if you can get it, but when the other side doesn't want it (and probably couldn't agree to it even if they wanted to, being an Iranian proxy), there's not really any solution besides a total purge.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I won't split hairs over terminology. Regardless of the moniker, we live in an age where any useful action has been deemed verboten by our modern understanding of martial morality. This grants an advantage to any group that lacks similar moral compunctions.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I think this is an example of typical-minding a far-group that you don't really interact with in any meaningful capacity. Palestinians aren't regretfully killing or raping civilians because they are limited to those particular targets - they are happy to do so, proud to do so, and will shout their joy from the rooftops. Most of the videos of Palestinians dragging girls back to Gaza or desecrating corpses aren't from Israeli propaganda, they're from pro-Palestine Telegram groups where everyone is in lockstep approval of their actions.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
Is South Korea all that feminist? Their current president was elected on a platform that included a promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, and his most committed supporters are vociferously anti-feminist. Hard to imagine such a man getting elected in, say, Sweden.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
The decision to intervene in Haiti, and the choice of personnel assigned to that decision, will be made in Washington, not Mexico City or Rio, and the decision-makers in Washington are very much concerned with the optics.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
Literally the only reason this is being done is because people are too concerned about the "optics" of a military force consisting of predominantly white or Latin soldiers laying down the law in uber-black Haiti, which is why the US, Canada and Latin America have refrained from sending troops. The black Caribbean states have no real military capabilities and no experience dealing with these conditions, so TPTB have been shopping the assignment around in Africa instead. They probably don't want to send the UN peacekeepers given their previous contributions to Haiti (mass rape and cholera).
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
A lot of Asiatic nationalism revolves around this sort of idealized, semi-mythological conception of a pure race undefiled by foreigners or untermenschen. A lot of Western nationalism too, but less so in Anglo countries. Hindus are a lot like Turks in this regard; the most virulent Turkish nationalists reject the obviously mixed nature of Turkish genetics and instead insist that they are a pure Turkic race, straight from the mountains of central Asia, the sons of Asena, etc etc.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
Frankly this is just a form of special pleading that only ever functions to try and thwart discussions of large-scale problems by shrinking them down to a series of individual decisions. It's de rigeur to talk of pathological behavior among white people, white communities, "whiteness", etc., and most people who sniff about "canards" of Jewish influence and malign behavior will not think twice before agreeing that white people bear collective moral, cultural and (especially) financial responsibility for a litany of supposed historical grievances. In many cases this is actually the law! The nuance that you insist upon is something that's only ever applied to shield members of an ingroup from criticism of that ingroup as a collective, so that no one ever gets to ask questions about whether your ingroup really is a malign influence on society - now, regardless of how large the problem is, you get to insist that it's just hundreds or thousands or millions of individual bad apples, nothing more. Where, precisely, is the boundary between "it's all just individual Jews making individual decisions" and "white people need to spend their lives denouncing previous generations of white people"? At what point does it become fair to make systemic criticisms of your ingroup?
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
This is a facetious comparison. Indira Gandhi jailed tens of thousands of her political opponents indefinitely and without a trial, and went so far as to forcibly dissolve lawfully elected state governments opposed to her rule and impose direct control of those states by the national government. There's no contemporary Western parallel to such practices outside of actual war conditions, a la Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, or Zelensky banning opposition parties after the Russian invasion. And Indira Gandhi didn't even have the excuse of an ongoing war, she just didn't think anyone had the right to take power away from her.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I'm inclined to believe the very concept of a "civilization-state", whether espoused by Hindu nationalists or Chinese communists, is simply historical revisionism - one big cope, since it allows motivated ideologues to pretend in the existence of a timeless core identity, unchanged throughout history, and most importantly unsullied by the presence of pesky minority groups, whether they be Muslims or Manchu or anyone else. For most of this "civilization-state"''s history, there was no such thing as "India", there was just a contiguous landmass occupied by different kingdoms and the occasional empire.
It also seems strange to me that Indian democracy should be considered stronger than most Western states when in living memory, an Indian prime minister suspended the constitution, canceled elections, jailed her opposition and ruled by fiat. And just three years after she was removed from office, she was reelected by the Indian public in a landslide. Is it supposed to be a knock against Canada that nothing of the sort ever happened in Ottawa?
but most immediately, that little bit of resistance might be the one thing that lets India maintain a 2.0 fertility rate, unlike the rest of the world undergoing population collapse.
The Hindu fertility rate in India has already declined below 2.0. Among religious groups, only the Muslims have a fertility rate above replacement in India.
CriticalDuty
9mo ago
I think you meant to post this as a top-level, not a reply.
That seems incredibly naïve to me. If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack involved very different circumstances, since they were assassinating PLO members living in Lebanon and various parts of Europe. They obviously couldn't kill large numbers of civilians in sovereign states they weren't at war with. There are some Hamas leaders living in Turkey and Qatar, but the rank-and-file of Hamas live in Gaza, among the civilian population.
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