FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…),
As someone who actually studied (independently, there's no way I could get a degree in it) HBD the actual answer to this is that while how African someone looks isn't entirely unrelated to their ancestry it isn't completely dependent upon it either. There's a wide variety of environmental (including the uterine environment) causes which can impact physical appearance, and social recognition of race (i.e. "they look somalian") can be dramatically altered by personal choice - if you clone an african and let one of them grow up in a tribe of bushmen while the other grows up as a member of the British aristocracy there'll be a noticeable difference in appearance despite identical genetics.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
People have noticed a few issues with Trump's health - his hands were blue in a recent photo, there was a moment where he was involved in a health scare, there was the fake AI Trump video, pictures of his hands showing signs of medical intervention...
I don't think he's nearly as disabled or checked out as Biden very clearly was, but his health is definitely shaky and I think there's a decent chance he dies in office, though not of foul play.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
What would possess Egypt to attack Israel exactly?
Egypt is currently bribed on a regular basis to prevent it from causing problems with Israel. Also, note that I never said attack - I said it would stop supporting Israel. There's a big difference between attacking a nation and not supporting it. I don't think the logic here is particularly hard to follow, either. If you were paying someone to do something and then stop paying it is pretty easy to assume that they will stop doing what you were paying them to do. Why exactly do you think the flow of bribes cutting off will mean that Egypt is suddenly more friendly with Israel?
A couple dozen to hundreds of people who were family members to people that were already sworn enemies of Israel just isn't a serious concern.
Hamas' entire recruiting strategy is to pick up and take care of people orphaned by Israel and the IDF. If you want to say that Hamas isn't a serious concern or problem for Israel then you're going to be contradicting a lot of their public statements.
While your point here isn't that strong anyway, I think you're being very sneaky by saying "people that were already sworn enemies of Israel" when the example in question was a twelve year old girl. If I'm making the argument that Israel's brutal treatment of others and expressed glee (how many pager jokes did you see?) at the killing of innocent children is going to destroy their reputation amongst a given people, "those 12 year old girls were sworn enemies of our country with a first world military" is not actually an argument that will convince anyone who isn't already on your side.
You know and I know that service in the Israeli military is compulsory. Who precisely isn't getting genocided in this scenario?
There are traffic offences with prison sentences longer than the one you get for not signing up with the IDF, and they recognise conscientious objectors. Every person who serves in the IDF had the choice to not do so - sure, some choices are harder than others, but if you're making the choice that service in a genocidal military is worth it for the career opportunities you know what you're getting into. Personally I'd prefer to spend a few months in prison than shoot children in the head or crush so many human bodies with a bulldozer that I get PTSD and kill myself, but I'm not Israeli so that choice isn't really gonna come up for me. The ultra orthodox are completely exempt too, so they're also free.
You're proposing a pretty divergent middle easy equilibrium so it's hard know exactly how things shake out. I don't really see the Saudis and Iran getting along regardless of how Israel is seen by the US so presumably Israel will look to join one of those two factions. What's the US's relation to Saudi Arabia in this hypothetical?
Saudia Arabia just came under the Pakistani nuclear umbrella and signed a pact with them. Most nations in the middle east are now extremely wary of US security guarantees because what happened in Qatar proves that they're completely worthless. My view of the US in this future would be that it is isolationist, withdrawing to the heartland and abandoning an unsustainable global empire.
As for Israel joining one of those two factions, lol. There's zero chance Iran lets them sign up with that axis (turns out when you use negotiations as a bad faith trick to bomb people they stop wanting to negotiate with you), and the Saudis aren't exactly happy to deal with them either. With support from the US cut off it isn't like they could afford to bribe their way into either of those power blocs, and they've made everyone around them hate them. They're going to have a lot of trouble shacking up with someone else.
Exactly zero neighboring nation is going to take the "maybe get turned to glass in order to conquer worthless deserts at at best a port" proposition.
I said that a land-grab would happen after the collapse of Israel, i.e. when nobody would be nuking anyone. Who participates would depend on which nations Israel reduced to glass in its death throes - I can absolutely see them spitefully ruining the environment on the way out.
Just to clarify, I don't think that those neighbouring powers will be directly militarily responsible for the collapse of Israel - I think that their presence necessitates an incredibly high military budget, which in turn is one of multiple sources of pressure on Israel.
Why would that be?
Have you ever seen a map? India and Israel aren't neighbours, and there are plenty of states hostile to both of them in between. What trade route would all these goods be taking?
And yeah, I don't think Israel would win a war against the entire rest of the world blood lusted against them, but no one thinks they would so this hypothetical becomes very boring.
How long did South Africa, another nuclear power, last? It wasn't like the rest of the world was attacking them militarily either, and they're a perfect example of what I'm saying will happen to Israel if it gets cut off from the world. Right now, Israel has a worse reputation internationally than apartheid SA and their actions are so odious that there are constant, material protests against them even from countries with leadership that has been thoroughly purchased and owned by Israel.
Right now the human infrastructure of the shipping industry is in open revolt at the idea of having to work for what Israel is doing in Gaza - there are massive strikes (I believe one of them is happening today) because people in other countries think what Israel is doing is so heinous that they do not wish to support it at all. I don't have to look very far into the future to see a world that is incredibly hostile to Israel and refuses to support their existence, let alone their freedom to exterminate unwelcome minorities for more lebensraum.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Your whole post hinges on a kind of pan Arab support that just doesn't seem to exist.
No? I'm assuming that the hand of the USA in the region is heavy and currently imposing peace on the leadership of those governments. How long does Egypt continue to support Israel when the USA stops paying them? I'm not asserting PAN ARAB UNITY (though the arabs do seem to come together, split apart, come together etc over longer periods of history) - just that there's currently a major world power spending lots of money to pacify the countries around Israel, and that those countries will be less pacified when that stops.
I think it would be hard to estimate what percentage of the Arab world ultimately would support VS oppose attacks on hezbollah.
I was talking about the immediate family members of Israeli victims. It doesn't matter which of the many groups dedicated to destroying Israel that they join, just that they join them.
Is Israel somehow not being sent food and weapon shipments from the US while also being drained financially to do so?
In this hypothetical the US/Israel relationship has been destroyed. That was given as an example as to how the relationship could be destroyed or why the US would want to withdraw from it. But I do find it entirely possible that a vengeful US could decide to prosecute Israel for AIPAC corruption and demand reparations for all the money sent there by politicians under the influence of an Israeli organisation like AIPAC. After all, they're operating as agents of a foreign government without being registered as such, so the idea of them actually getting prosecuted in the future isn't that far fetched.
OK yes, so the plan is that the Israelis are getting genocide one way or the other, got it.
Ok yes, so you're just a muslim hater who wants all the brown people to die. Please don't put words into my mouth or claim that I'm actually saying something I'm not - I believe telling someone what they believe is actually against the rules on this site. But for my actual objection to this claim anyway - the destruction of Nazi germany did not mean that the Germans were genocided. Presumably what would happen after the collapse of Israel is either a land-grab from the countries around them or the creation of a Palestinian state which the stateless Israeli survivors could become citizens of (after some intense denazification programs).
It's not like other genocidal nations struggle to find trading partners, turkey is in nato, Russia even finds trading partners in Europe as it invades one of their neighbors. Half the middle Eastern nations have committed at least an ethnic cleansing.
Who? Who are you talking about? What nation is going to be trading with Israel after they get cut off from the US? It isn't Russia, it isn't China. The only potential candidate I can think of is India, and they're going to have a lot of fun actually trading with Israel. I have been asking repeatedly for you to provide a specific example of who would actually be willing to do so and all you have are vague allusions to how other nations with completely different circumstances managed it. Again, if you're going to provide an example like this you need to actually explain the points of similarity and difference between those states. Russia being sanctioned by the US over Ukraine is such a completely different situation that you can't just make blanket allusions and go "she'll be right mate".
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Although this is confusing because before you've alluded to Israel still being at war with some entity as their military protectionism being cut off was stated as some important thing.
Israel is violently hated by every single one of its regional neighbours that isn't ruled by an Israeli client regime. I don't think it is particularly far-fetched to suppose that they would actively and pre-emptively attack Iran or Lebanon anyway, especially seeing as how they have actually already done that. Their security environment is extremely dangerous and hostile - war could come from practically every single direction.
Are we proposing that like Arabs are blood lusted for the destruction of Israel like in those threads on super hero power scaling?
Just look at what Israel has done in the region. When you blow up a bunch of children's hands with your cool pager stunt, do you think those children are going to grow up and be strong supporters of your government? When the 12 year old girl they killed in the pager operation's family went to her funeral, they wearing brand new Hezbollah gear. Nobody in the region likes Israel - they either fear Israel and the US or they simply accept Israeli/US money to play nice. If the IDF packed it up tomorrow and joined the Rainbow Family, they have already sown a bumper crop of blood vengeance oaths in the communities around them.
Of course, that's leaving aside the geopolitical aspects - Israel is an outpost of the US empire, an empire which is currently failing and losing its ability to exert control over the rest of the world. Why would China and Russia, when given the chance, not turn Israel into a gigantic blood-and-treasure hole for the US empire (more than it already is) at the cost of giving the arabs a bunch of weapons?
You're proposing the rest of the world commit a genocide by your own definition of blockading food imports. Or do you think what Israel is accused of doing doesn't count?
I think there's a big difference between blocking food imports, sniping people who go out to fish, purposefully inducing a famine etc. and being such a widely reviled state that nobody wants to sell their food to you. Do you see a difference between locking someone else's child in your basement dungeon and starving them to death as opposed to a child murderer realising that nobody wants to sell them food?
But more importantly, what's the point of bringing morality into this? It was morally wrong for Israel to do what it did to Gaza, but that didn't prevent them from doing it. I'm not saying that it will be a good thing when Israel is unable to support its population but that when it is cut off from international trade flows it will not be able to support its population. Again, an argument against this position would be something along the lines of pointing out that they'd be able to use x farming techniques or y technological solution to fertiliser and soil quality issues.
but why would anyone accept refugees from this pariah state?
I imagine that as long as they weren't active participants in ethnic cleansing or had a demonstrated record of opposition to it (like those who refused to join the IDF) they'd be welcomed with open arms. But you are right - a lot of them wouldn't be accepted as refugees, especially those who enthusiastically supported crimes against humanity or shot children for trying to retrieve the corpses of their family members. This would be a big problem, and I'm honestly not sure there's a happy outcome for anybody involved. The organisations that would be the Nazi-hunters of this future are making lists and recording details right now, like the Hind Rajab foundation - which is already responsible for many nations being incredibly unwelcome to IDF soldiers.
Maybe I've misread you but this all pattern matches to a frustrating trope of implying that those jews should just fuck back off to Europe which is a microcosm of a kind of third worldist flavored grievance politic that I find incredibly distasteful. Wakanda wish casting.
In my heart of hearts think that the Israelis should go back to where they came from, and those who cannot should be integrated into a single state called Palestine - after rigorous prosecutions for warcrimes, crimes against humanity, regular crimes (you hear about the IDF pro rape protests?), etc. But I freely recognise and admit that my preferred outcome is extremely unlikely - which is why I'm not talking about what I want for Israel, but what I think the ultimate consequences of their current trajectory is.
How does Israel survive without access to global trade networks? How do they feed themselves? How do they resupply their interceptor missiles without outside help? How do they maintain their social cohesion when the huge cash infusions from the US which keep their society together and functional go away? These are all serious problems for the long-term stability of the nation and in this entire conversation nobody has presented a single serious proposal for how Israel would face those challenges in the absence of a supportive hegemon that can shower them with blood and treasure.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Are all the Gazans also getting sentenced to death in the Hague for supporting their own genocidal government that commits war crimes in this fantasy of yours?
Have you been reading the thread or did you just come in midway because you got asked to moderate a post? This conversation was taking place in a hypothetical future where Israel is cut off from international trade and aid due to their genocide of the Palestinians - there wouldn't be any Gazans left to celebrate. We're discussing a worst case scenario, because my original point was that committing acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing is a terrible idea for Israel because it doesn't have the geography or natural resources in order to survive a future where it has lost the support of the US and other western allies.
For the record, my actual fantasy is that both sides put down the weapons and come together in peace after the people responsible for the crimes on both side are prosecuted (and no, children who were born after the last election are not responsible for the crimes of their government).
So your frothing genocide is still killing ~5 million people even assuming every European descendended jew is eligible.
Frothing genocide? I'm not proposing any kind of genocide at all - I'm saying that Israel would fall apart if it became a pariah state, which is very different. A pariah state cut off from the rest of the world and surrounded by people who violently hate them, with a population it cannot support with domestic agricultural output alone and a military it cannot maintain without access to international supply chains is not long for this world.
Moreover, as mentioned previously, a lot of the Israelis would simply just leave because grinding poverty in the desert is not a particularly tempting option when you have a passport that will take you to the first world - not to mention that unless you do become a refugee in this case you are overtly supporting a state that just committed ethnocide (which tends to put a dampener on people's sympathies for you).
What level of diversity do you expect to be present in the territory after you finish your retributive genocide?
Aside from clarifying that this would not actually be a retributive genocide, nor would I be able to take credit for it, who knows? It depends on how thoroughly the Israelis exterminated the Palestinians in this hypothetical future, and exactly what knocks the Israeli state out in the end. Ideally the Palestinian Christians, Muslims and Jews would be able to live together in peace.
Also, you seem remarkably hostile here - I'm not trying to score points, but it seems like you're getting unreasonably angry about this topic. Just to reiterate, this conversation is in the context of a future where Israel becomes a pariah state after committing horrific crimes against humanity. This isn't a conversation about whether Israel deserves to exist or the moral righteousness of the Zionist cause(though I'm sure you'd disagree with me there). The question is whether Israel can survive after being cut off from the rest of the world - and if you want to argue against that idea, you need to bring arguments like "They'd be able to source food from x because y, and they'd be able to get the rare earth metals required for their missiles from z" rather than just moral preening.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
I have an acquaintance with family in South Africa. Things there are legitimately quite bad. I would not travel there - and yet, I don’t feel nearly so strongly about things which happen there as things in the US, even if they’re more severe. That’s because I don’t live there. My day to day is not affected by it, and does not affect it.
On the other hand, I live in the US, and take things much more seriously here.
As someone from a country on the opposite side of the world, US politics are taken seriously down here as well - the US is the western hegemon and the decisions made there have severe consequences for the rest of the world. What matters in the US matters to the rest of the world as well - our Murdoch media whipped up a storm talking positively about Charlie Kirk despite nobody here really caring about him at all.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
If somebody imprisons innocent people in their dungeon and uses them for slave labor people don't actually find it hypocritical to sentence that person to prison. The world in fact did not object to imposing the same conditions on the nazis (death) that the nazis did to the jews. More importantly, those Israelis could simply flee as refugees or return to the country their parents left from - they're actively choosing to remain in their genocidal (remember that we're still talking about the hypothetical so the argument that they haven't been convicted yet is irrelevant) ethnostate. The fact that they are unable to feed themselves because they prioritised ethnic cleansing over sustainability is not really going to engender much sympathy or charity from the outside world.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport - it doesn't matter where you were born. The actually relevant statistic here would be how many Israelis are able to get a passport/citizenship for another country. All this statistic really does is establish that at least 30% of the country could just immediately fuck off back home if they objected to Israeli policy.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
You can't actually think the world would be willing to starve Israelis to death for the crime of starving Palestinians.
The world was willing to execute Nazis after the holocaust even though their crime was executing jews. Any Israelis who did not voluntarily leave the country and renounce Zionism would be regarded the same as the nazis who didn't give up after the war was lost - they're actively committed to the project and voluntarily taking on responsibility for what Zionism did.
But that said, this wouldn't be the world starving Israel to death - Israel's remaining farmers would be able to produce some food after all. It just wouldn't be able to support a population nearly as large as it currently has, which would be a big problem when their military protection gets cut off as well. Food security is just one of the large number of threats waiting for an isolated Israel, and while it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem by itself the real issue is how it would exacerbate all the other problems they're facing.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?
If you feel so strongly about people being taken as hostages, I assume you're aware of the vast numbers of Palestinians that have been kept hostage by Israel as prisoners? If that's your actual objection and you're concerned about violations of international law there's actually a lot of ground to go over with regards to Israeli violations of it. If that's your actual point, I'm more than happy to go over it with you.
But if your point is just who/whom (taking hostages is fine and legal when the Israelis do it but a warcrime when the Palestinians take a tenth of that number) then I'm not really interested in a discussion, or what passes for one when your criteria is just "if it is my side it is good, if it is the other side it is bad".
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
We're talking about a hypothetical future where Israel has become a pariah state. I don't think it is particularly unlikely that other nations in the region would conspire to interdict shipping, or that Iran/Russia would supply the houthis with enough long-rage ballistics to shut down all shipping to Israel regardless of distance.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
How closely have you been paying attention to the region? This isn't speculation, this is a past event that has already bankrupted one of Israel's ports (Elilat), and the US donated a fighter jet to Poseidon's air force while trying to avoid their missiles (well that or it was just incompetence, which is the official story). There's even a wikipedia article on the topic (Red Sea Crisis).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
They can import as much food as they like from people willing to sell to them.
This is actually not true. There are real limits to the amount of food that can be imported to Israel due to their security situation - and remember that in this case we're talking about an Israel several years into the future from now, where their reputation has been torched and nobody is willing to support or trade with them. No more US money to Egypt and the other nations around them means no more land trade. The US giving up (well more than they have already) at dealing with the houthis means there's no more shipping, either. How does Israel import the materiel and energy required to exist without US support? This is a serious logistical question, and as far as I can tell the answer is that there's no way for them to do so once the US teat is removed.
As we've seen with Russia, both food and energy exports are not constrained.
Russia in the present day is an entirely different beast from a Pariah Israel. Not only was Russia able to continue to trade with China, they kept on trading with Europe as well - via India. Russia is a gigantic country sharing land borders with multiple trading partners that increased their investment in Russian trade after the US attempted to impose sanctions. Not only is Russia not dependent upon imports of any critical requirements, they have a substantial industrial and energy base which is actually superior to the US in several aspects. If Israel had the size and breadth of Russia, I'd agree with you that they wouldn't have anything to fear, but that's not the world we live in. There is a very big difference between having your exports of energy be cut off and having your imports of energy cut off, especially when that specific type of energy is mandatory for modern military equipment and logistics.
On the same note Russia, historically, has been an exporter of food - and there's a big difference between being a net exporter of food and a net importer of food when you get cut off from international trade. How does Israel import food, energy and fertiliser when they are cut off from Western support and largesse? Seriously, how? It can't be over land or sea, and air travel just isn't cheap enough to be viable. Throw in the difficulties of dealing with the black market (mandatory BDS laws seem like a safe assumption in this hypothetical) and you end up with a thoroughly untenable situation.
Sanctions and boycotts have not stopped these countries. Inconvenienced? Yes. But no sanctions regime is airtight.
The cutting off of aid to Israel would be far more significant than the sanctions and boycotts. US support for Israel is more than just the 3 billion number that gets bandied around - there's immense amounts of financial support put into supporting Israel and their security environment. Even if Israel wasn't sanctioned at all, simply cutting off the vast flows of free money will have huge negative impacts on their society. Being forced to accept a worse price on your exported goods is one thing - being unable to import the basic materials required for human life and economic flourishing when you are unable to source them domestically is an entirely different one.
I don't know why you insist on this being the silver bullet that fells the Zionists, but it's clear you in some form or another believe in the priors of BDS.
"My car has been driving for hours since I filled up the petrol tank, so I don't know why you insist on the tank being empty being the silver bullet that stops me from driving."
Beneath all the abstractions of economics are hard material realities. Modern first world societies are reliant upon vast amounts of energy and various other inputs in order to function - and Israel is simply unable to provide those inputs without extensive external support. This does not mean that Israel is going to immediately collapse overnight, but it does mean that Israel will be unable to continue in its present form. This is why I keep asking the questions I do - how does Israel maintain itself when it is unable to import the fertiliser it needs to grow food, let alone the extra food required to make up for the shortfall caused by lack of access to fertiliser and all the other imports required to maintain their agricultural sector?
Sure, that's a crisis they could probably deal with if there was nothing else going on - but when the US military support is cut off at the same time all the money required to fix the farms will be going to guns instead.
Israel will always have American sponsorship, if only because it is where most of the world's Jews live, so it is a hypothetical of hypotheticals.
Israel is currently losing support in the US on both sides of the aisle. Have you looked at recent polling on attitudes towards Israel? I don't think this is nearly as much of a surefire bet as you - assuming present trends continue Israel support is going to be a hard sell for the political right in a few years, let alone the political left. Given that we're talking about a time in the future, what exactly do you think is going to reverse that trend?
My evidence, to counter your 'history', is all of the real-life regimes right now who ignore sanctions and embargos without great difficulty.
How many of them are as reliant on external imports and support as Israel? How many of them are dependent upon security guarantees from other powers? How many of the real-life regimes that got killed by sanctions and isolation have you looked at to compare with Israel? You have the start of a good argument here, but you need to actually point out the points of comparison and why they're a good fit. Claiming that Israel can handle sanctions because Russia can is like saying that a chihuahua can protect a herd of sheep from wolves because a Pyrenean Mountain Dog can do the same thing.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
And after I went to all the trouble of finding non hypothetical points for discussion like food security and energy. Oh well, c'est la vie.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
I think I can roughly guess your political leanings and positions on this matter
I've openly stated my political leanings on the motte in several places - but if you can guess, please do so because I've been called both left and right depending on the day and it'd be nice for someone to be able to correctly identify where I sit on the spectrum.
I'd just say that eighty years of failure and defeat, with Israel consistently prevailing over great numbers and further entrenching itself does not make me believe it will inevitably fall. In fact, it is the opposite.
So if you saw an elite athlete who had been performing excellently for several decades start to falter, would you claim that his fourty years of active athleticism is a compelling argument against the idea that he would grow old and frail? After all, he had 40 years of strength and prevailing over great opposition - why would a few gray hairs and injuries be a sign that he was failing?
You want to wishcast the fate of European African regimes onto Israel.
Wishcast? I'm not sure what you mean by that. What I'm actually doing is comparing the trajectory of nations in similar situations throughout history - and there's actually quite a lot of examples. The Crusader Kingdom of Outremer is an even more apt comparison, complete with the useless scholars that require a lot of material support.
But you do not admit the possibility that the natives are simply destroyed.
No? My actual assumption was that the wiping out of the Palestinians would be what was responsible for Israel becoming a pariah state. Committing genocide (and there's no way you can spin 'the natives are simply destroyed' as non-genocidal) would absolutely be enough to mark Israel as a pariah state and get them cut off from the rest of the world.
But more fundamentally to my point... it doesn't matter if the Palestinians are there or not - Israel is unable to support itself over the long term without extensive inflows of capital and materiel from the external world, and when those flows are shut off the resource limits available to them will exacerbate internal stresses and conflicts.
I reject your narrative of history.
You're not alone - the first lesson of history, after all, is that nobody learns anything from history. But more importantly, what you're tossing out and ignoring from my post are the hard resource limits that international ostracization would place upon Israel. There are serious material concerns which would place hard limits on the ability of Israel to maintain their military effectiveness in the face of a global boycott and abandonment.
Do you know how much food Israel imports? Do you know what kind of other agricultural-based technology they import in order to farm their particular environment? Do you know how much energy they import, or how much of their tech sector is dependent upon foreign investment? How does Israel maintain their military edge when completely cut off from the supply chains required to make their technology work? These are all incredibly serious questions relating to the future of Israel which you have just completely ignored, seemingly because you do not think that there are any lessons to be learned from history.
And I assert this with the same confidence and lack of evidence as you give me.
It is admittedly very hard to provide evidence for exactly how a society breaks down in a hypothetical future world - but honestly, I think you actually have a bit more confidence than me. I'm calling back to history and comparable events in order to buttress my arguments, while you're simply asserting that history has nothing to teach because the Israelis would be much better at genocide than other people, which involves flying much further out from any available evidence than I would on here.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
But there is a sincere core of Zionists who believe that Israel was promised to them by their God and they will stay there to the bitter end.
And is that enough to maintain Israel as it is currently constituted? Does it include the Orthodox population of useless eaters/religious scholars? Being willing to fight on to the bitter end just means that the end will be bitter, not that it never comes.
A impoverished state with nuclear weapons and arms - not that it would ever get that desperate - will never fall. The Arab leadership very well know where those warheads are aimed at.
Did South Africa have nuclear weapons? I'm sure the leadership of all the black nations around them knew where those warheads were aimed at. How effectively did they prevent the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime? I'm confident they'll be just as effective at protecting the Israeli apartheid regime as they were in the past.
The fantasy of the Israeli state dissolving itself after sufficient isolation is simply that.
Fantasy? No, it is simply the most likely course of action based on historical trends. Pariah ethnostates that become liabilities for their imperial sponsors tend not to have particularly long lifespans, historically. Modern states with modern militaries are dependent upon a vast web of interconnected supply chains that simply cannot be replaced with domestic production. Where will Pariah Israel acquire the petroleum that their military needs to run? Where will Pariah Israel get the advanced electronics and armaments required to maintain their qualitative edge? Where will Pariah Israel get the vast amounts of funding that they use to support and maintain their society (someone has to pay for all those orthodox scholars)?
The reason I believe Israel would fall after becoming a pariah state is that there are several huge inflows of capital and materiel from abroad that are currently required to maintain the country in the face of tremendous opposition, and there's no viable domestic replacement for them in the hypothetical future of a Pariah Israel.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
If Israel has to choose between becoming an illiberal pariah state like North Korea or its nonexistence it will go for the former every time.
This isn't actually a choice. Becoming an "illiberal pariah state" is not a long-term stable situation - you can't run a first world economy with Israel's geography while completely cut off from all international trade and support. Take away all the direct and indirect support provided by America, as well as the support provided by diaspora jews (part of becoming a pariah state means that remittances and other sources of funding/support will go away too), and you're looking at a country with a very limited lifespan.
One of the targets of Iran's strikes against Israel was the diamond exchange - the diamond exchange is one of Israel's most profitable trades, despite the fact that they don't actually have any diamond mines in the country. How long is that going to last when Israel is cut off from international trade flows? How long is their tech sector going to last when all foreign investment is pulled? Israel does not have the population demographics or material resources required to sustain themselves when completely cut off from the rest of the world (to say nothing of what their internal politics will look like when the orthodox are forced to work and join the army). Don't forget that the majority of Israelis have the ability to simply fuck off back to their actual home country - and when faced with a choice between grinding poverty in a pariah state and living a first world lifestyle back in the west I think a portion of them will simply leave.
Pariah Israel would simply be a last, desperate grasp before the entire project is swept away into the dustbin of history, and if there's any hope for survival for Israel it means not ending up as a universally despised and hated ethnostate.
FirmWeird
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9mo ago
If you think that qualifies as a tidal wave of gasoline what do you think about the vast numbers of Palestinian hostages? Sure, some of the small children they arrest get charged with crimes, but some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank" etc - actively serving in the military. October 7th is a rounding error when compared to what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians beforehand, and if you want to claim that it justifies what happened next then you unfortunately also have to justify everything the Palestinians have done in revenge.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Someone connected to him claimed that Charlie had personally been worrying about his life being in danger over this specific topic - I agree that it has broken a lot of brains, but there's a difference between someone just arbitrarily blaming the jews for everything and being curious about a murder victim's recent thoughts about who wants to murder him.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk
This is exactly why I was curious - after seeing this tweet https://x.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1955705962964111425 I wanted to know what the anti-semitic right's perspective on it was (forgive me if that's not how you identify yourself), so thank you for the heads up.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
If every war could be fought such that really only the heads of the respective states/organizations were killed it'd be a vast improvement across the board.
Have you seen any pictures out of Gaza recently, or seen any of the stories about what's happening? I don't think you're making the point you think you're making if you've actually seen what the strip looks like now.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Asking you because you're the poster here I'd trust the most to be aware of this particular issue, but I've seen rumours on social media that Charlie was actually concerned about assassination recently because he'd been pissing off the Israelis. Do you think or have any evidence that this particular aspect is potentially a factor?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
The most recently highlighted instance of Israeli snipers targeting people was explicitly murdering a civilian - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich
“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.
Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.
“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”
I don't think it was a good thing that Charlie died but that doesn't mean he wasn't out there advocating for what happened to him to happen to others.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
I've posted about this before but I firmly believe that the answer to this is the lithium/chemical hunger hypothesis. I experienced the same thing when I was in Japan, but I was eating incredibly rich gourmet beef ramen for breakfast and washing it down with a sweet pastry. Still lost vast amounts of weight.
In fairness I think the people on the left currently mocking Kirk's death were also mocking the idea of free speech (or freeze peach to use their infantilising and credibility-subtracting language).
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