FtttG
User ID: 1175
I'd honestly love to be proven wrong and learn that the Hind Rajab and Mohamaed Bhar stories were just a bad dream
The fact that individual civilians were killed in a conflict does not prove that said conflict was a genocide. Even the fact that individual soldiers committed war crimes during a conflict doesn't prove that said conflict was a genocide. Pro-Palestine activists think they're helping their case by claiming that every civilian death is evidence of genocidal intent on Israel's part. But because civilian deaths are a feature of every war (especially wars in densely populated urban centres; especially especially wars in densely populated urban centres in which belligerents deliberately hide among the civilian populace), all you're doing is collapsing the distinction between "genocide" and "urban conflict" by carelessly conflating the two. Twenty years ago, the word "racist" was a potent one indeed and people would react to the accusation with indignation: after a generation of woke people abusing it to refer to any behaviour they don't like (no matter how innocuous), there are now plenty of people who react to the word "racist" as if you'd called them a meany doo-doo head. Do you really think it's a sensible idea to do the same thing to the word "genocide"? Because that's the way it's headed. Do you want more genocide? Because that's how you get more genocide.
But all that's almost beside the point. I don't think you looked at the facts on the ground of the current conflict and dispassionately concluded that Israel is conducting a genocide. I strongly suspect that if I'd asked you the same question on October 6th 2023, I would've got much the same answer. You're citing examples of Israel killing civilians in the current conflict, not because they support your argument, but simply because of the availability heuristic. Israel was being accused of "genocide" from the morning of October 8th, 2023, before the war had even begun in earnest; a bunch of Hollywood celebrities signed an open letter condemning Israel's military action in Gaza as genocide in 2014; I'm sure I can go back to the 2000s, the 1990s, even further and see the same accusation lobbed against them time and time again. (The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic bluntly states that Israel has faced this accusation without reprieve literally from the day of its founding.) You explicitly compared Israel to the Nazis and demanded the state be "denazified", but the difference is that the Holocaust actually saw a meaningful (and steep) decline in the global Jewish populace. Strange, isn't it, how the Israelis have been accused of genociding the Palestinians for the better part of a century, and yet the Palestinian population only ever increases over time? It's the Shepard tone of genocides — which is to say, not a genocide at all. How many genocides can you name in which the genocidaires came to a dead stop as soon as the people they were genociding agreed to release hostages?
You apparently expect me to simultaneously believe that the vastly technologically superior, limitlessly bloodthirsty and nuke-equipped Israel isn't pulling its punches and is in fact doing everything in its power to exterminate every last Palestinian from the face of the earth — and yet are somehow so incompetent that they've failed to wipe out a technologically inferior opponent who almost entirely reside right on its doorstep? I'm sorry, but I cannot believe both of these things. It is beyond me.
They've blown up the civilian infrastructure and all the hospitals
If you don't want your hospitals and civilian infrastructure blown up, don't use them as weapons caches in flagrant violation of the Geneva convention. I really don't see what's so complicated about this.
You claimed that Israel was being restrained and fighting with one arm behind their back.
When did I say that?
But when I look at what's left of Gaza now the idea that this is Israel being restrained just makes me believe that they need to be stopped or denazified before they get the chance to do this to anyone else.
How do you think Israel ought to have prosecuted a war against a combatant like Hamas? What would you have done differently?
I disagree. I suspect most of the people loudly chanting "defund the police" in the summer of 2020 would be very embarrassed if you pointed that out to them five years later. And as for the people actually calling to abolish the police, forget it.
Data points: in June 2020, 34% of Americans supported defunding the police. Nine months later, that figure had fallen to 18%. By October 2021, only 15% of Americans wanted police departments defunded at all, of which 9% only wanted them defunded "a little" (Ctrl-F "a little").
In other words, at most one-sixth (probably more like one-twentieth) of the US are progressive diehards, and a further sixth (or perhaps a quarter) will pretend to be progressive diehards so long as they think it's socially advantageous to do so.
If by "change their minds on the underlying subject" you mean "most BLM people think it's bad when the police kill unarmed black people who are not resisting arrest" — that was never the part of the movement that was under dispute. Even MAGA types agreed that this was bad. Even Bill O'Reilly was horrified by the Eric Garner case.
see the story about the IDF soldier who killed himself because he couldn't live with being the driver
"Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
They deployed more explosive power relative to the size of their target than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
... which they deployed over the course of two entire years, as opposed to all of that explosive power being released in one go. And the death toll in that period was between a quarter* and three-fifths** of the death toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, making it abundantly clear that the primary function of all this explosive ordnance was not the taking of human life for its own sake, but the destruction of Hamas's tunnel network.
I'm baffled as to how you expect me to be horrified by this metric.
*Assuming a death toll of 246k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 63k in Gaza.
**Assuming a death toll of 150k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 90k in Gaza
FtttG
1d ago
You're just never going to drop the "Israel is committing genocide" thing, are you?
Well, for my money the Current Thing at the moment is the hot war in Gaza. So assuming that specific war ends and stops being the Current Thing, my question is what will be the next Current Thing other than the hot war in Gaza.
Personally, I am sceptical that "the relationship between the US and Israel" will become the thing that everyone in the Anglosphere is talking about in the way that e.g. the conflict in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, BLM and Covid were. Even if a majority of Americans want something (such as AIPAC being brought to heel), that doesn't mean it'll be the thing that everyone is talking about (indeed, per the toxoplasma criterion, controversial things get discussed more than things about which there is widespread agreement).
none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do
I think you greatly overestimate the staying power of Current Things and the degree of emotional investment normies hold in them. I think that, by Christmas, an absolute majority of normies will have completely forgotten about the "genocide" they spent two years performatively condemning. In the US, Google searches for "Black Lives Matter" peaked in June 2020 and had fallen to 6% of the peak by December. Of the people who posted a black square on their Instagrams in the summer of 2020, what proportion of them do you think could name an unarmed black person killed by a police officer since George Floyd? Of the people calling for others to mask up and calling the unvaccinated "plague rats", I suspect that a majority of them believe that literally no one has died of Covid since the lockdowns ended. Out of sight, out of mind.
Think about how much the average American (even the average Democratic-voting American) cared about the Palestinian cause before October 7th, 2023. By January, I think they'll have regressed to the historical mean. Expecting anything else is almost certainly the product of wishful thinking.
FtttG
1d ago
Firing tank shells into Churches
From what I can gather it was a fragment of a single tank shell which struck a single church by mistake. Your hyperbolic condemnation of every single thing Israel does is counterproductive.
It might be a local Current Thing in the US for some time to come, but it didn't seem to get much traction in the wider Anglosphere. In Ireland, people had already stopped talking about it by the following week.
In the UK, according to Google Trends, searches for his name peaked the day he was killed and had fallen to one-fifth of their peak by September 13th. Numbers for Ireland, Canada and Australia are practically identical.
FtttG
1d ago
You're absolutely right, I didn't mean "the most important issue facing the world right now". I simply meant "the issue that everyone is talking about", regardless of its importance.
FtttG
1d ago
I can definitely envision nationwide anti-ICE protests in the same ballpark as 2020 BLM next year.
I may have exaggerated slightly. Prior to Covid, the gay marriage referendum was the thing everyone in Ireland was talking about for the first half of 2015 and several months prior. The campaign to legalise abortion via constitutional amendment was likewise a really big deal for several years prior to its successful legalisation in 2018, occupying discussions almost as much as Brexit and Orange Man Bad (Irish people would put "Repeal the 8th" in their Instagram or Tinder bios, and plain black sweaters with the word "REPEAL" emblazoned on them in all caps sold in their tens of thousands). One sometimes gets the impression that progressive politicians and activists in Ireland were victims of their own success: after both gay marriage and abortion were legalised with massive public mandates, they found themselves at a bit of a loss for what to do next, hence their eagerness to lend their support for foreign causes like Ukraine and Gaza. Neither nebulously-defined "trans rights", nor farcical efforts to portray Black Lives Matter as a movement which has the slightest relevance to Irish politics, don't scratch quite the same itch. The campaign to amend the Irish constitution to remove any reference to "marriage" or "mothers" was a resounding failure, being rejected even by many who consider themselves progressive. Likewise the so-called "hate speech bill", which was never put to a public vote but which was so controversial that it was shelved.
Other than those two, in the linked post, I listed some domestic Irish issues which were the Current Thing in Ireland — but, as a rule, only for the duration of a single news cycle. For a few weeks in January 2022, everyone was talking about the murder of Ashling Murphy, then promptly forgot about it as soon as her killer was arrested, and immediately started talking obsessively about Ukraine for the next twenty months.
Looking back over the past two years, I sincerely cannot think of any domestic Irish event or issue which captured the public's imagination (or had nearly as much staying power) as much as the conflict in Gaza has. There have been literally hundreds of protests against Israel across the country; both our prime minister and President have weighed in on the conflict several times, as has virtually every recently-minted Irish celebrity (and some less recently minted); our government are considering passing a bill which would make it a criminal offense to do business with certain Israeli firms and so on and so forth. The only domestic issues which even came close to this level of omnipresence were a) the ongoing debate about immigration, and by extension the anti-immigration riots in Dublin in November 2023; and b) the civil rape trial against Conor McGregor, which everyone was talking about from the tail end of last year and early this year.
FtttG
1d ago
I explicitly stated that I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict will come to a complete end any time soon, so I don't know why you're pointing that out. It doesn't seem like a productive contribution to the discussion.
Thank you for the detailed, succinct write-up. I intended to make a top-level post using the presumptive end of the current Gaza conflict as a jumping-off point to ask a much broader question, namely:
What will the next Current Thing™ be?
In May of last year, I argued that media minutes, column inches and the forefronts of public consciousness follow a Pareto distribution, in which one issue clearly dominates at the expense of all others. In Ireland (and presumably a significant chunk of the Anglosphere and also the entire world), a list of these "primary" issues over the past decade or so looked as follows:
- Brexit (June-November 2016; intermittently recurs as a secondary topic whenever there's a lull in one of the subsequent primary topics)
- Donald Trump election and presidency (November 2016-March 2020)
- Covid (March 2020-January 2022)
- George Floyd/BLM protests (May 2020-September 2020) [I'm cheating a little bit; while the protests were ongoing they seemed to take up exactly as much space in the discourse as Covid, then after they died down Covid returned as the sole current thing)
- Russia-Ukraine war (February 2022-October 2023)
- Israel-Gaza war (October 2023-present)
I'm not saying the Israel-Palestine conflict is permanently over: as a cold conflict which periodically goes hot for 77 consecutive years, it would be very impressive indeed if the imminent cessation of hostilities represented a decisive end to the conflict. But I do think there's a very good chance that it stops being the "primary" issue that dominates the discourse, and retreats to the status it occupied prior to October 7th, 2023. Diehards will still emblazon their balconies with Palestine flags, you have not heard "from the river to the sea" for the last time, there will be periodic calls to boycott and divest — but it will go back to being a page 4 story. I strongly suspect that the era of copycat attacks on random Jewish civilians in First World nations has come to an end.
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?
Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution. Sometimes the easy, obvious answer is the correct one: activists had been complaining about police mistreatment of black Americans for years prior to the murder of George Floyd, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine could not have come as a complete surprise to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with the geopolitics of the region. In this framing, obvious candidates for the next Current Thing™ include AI, the ongoing debate about immigration from the global south, and Orange Man Bad. In the latter case, it's entirely possible that all of the "ceasefire now" people will quickly realise that their moment in the limelight has passed, exchange their keffiyehs for black bloc and get back to partying like it's 2017.
Playing the game on Hard Mode, the answer might be something completely unexpected. In January 2020, who among us could have foreseen that a virus in Wuhan (whether from a lab or a wet market) would determine the course of our lives for pretty much the duration of March 2020-December 2021? In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
FtttG
2d ago
If there's no aid on the ships, in what sense are they humanitarian? Because they're full of good vibes and well-wishers?
FtttG
2d ago
I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?
FtttG
2d ago
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It's the book which is widely credited with inventing YA fiction, for better and for worse. An easy read which I know I'll never read again, and probably the best book written by a 17-year-old girl I've ever read. The name on the protagonist's birth cert is "Ponyboy"; now there's another reference I understand, RIP.
I recently saw a clip of David Lynch speaking some time before his death. In stark contrast to his usual affable, Jimmy Stewart-esque demeanour, Lynch sounds not merely exasperated, not personally affronted, but positively wounded by the recent trend of people watching films and TV shows on their phones. He patiently explains that his films are designed to be watched on a big screen with a real sound system: how can you possibly expect to experience the intended emotional reaction watching the film on a screen smaller than your hand, using the integrated speakers which can't reproduce any frequencies lower than 200 Hz? He practically begs the viewer to watch his films the way they were intended to be seen. Boy, can I ever relate.
Personally, I cannot fathom the idea of watching a movie or TV show on a smartphone. I recall exactly one instance in which I've done it: myself and the girlfriend were on a long train ride through Italy and had neglected to bring anything to read, so we watched The Collector on her iPhone, each wearing one of her Airpods. (I think the movie was mixed in mono, thankfully.) The only kinds of videos I'll watch on my phone are ones devoid of aesthetic merit: YouTube reviews, Instagram reels and so on. But perhaps people like me are going the way of the dodo.
FtttG
5d ago
Price including the sales tax is the norm in Europe, the lack of it was one of the biggest culture shocks the last time I was in the states. I understand some jurisdictions have passed laws against drip-pricing - the idea that the price indicated must be the final price (i.e. including the sales tax) seems like an obvious extension of that principle.
FtttG
5d ago
When I came to realize all supernaturalism is a lie, and the only way one with intellect and curiosity can believe it is to intentionally blind themselves, I became very angry with everyone who should have known better (or DID know better) and lied to me.
If the Witnesses were sincere in their faith, they weren't lying to him. They were flagrantly, wilfully ignorant, but not technically lying.
FtttG
5d ago
Is there a word for this process?
Per Quillette, The Boy Who Inflated the Concept of 'Wolf'.
I was about to ask how, exactly, destroying a Greek diner's exterior could possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause.
... but then it occurred to me that "pointlessly destructive behaviour which could not possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause even in principle" actually describes a great deal of pro-Palestine activism, and activism for a number of other omnicause issues. So, yeah, good point.
A few months ago, @ymeskhout shared a video of a 23-year-old American woman who happened across a diner decorated with what she thought were Israeli flags, and began tearing them off the diner while chanting various pro-Palestine slogans and condemning the diner for being complicit in genocide. The proprietor came out of the diner to ask her what on earth she was doing, and pointed out to her that (I'm sure you've guessed the punchline) it was a Greek diner decorated with Greek flags. Shortly afterwards, the woman was arrested for destruction of property.
Leaving aside what this farcical incident says about the typical pro-Palestine activist and how well-informed they are, what really jumped out at me was that the perpetrator recorded the video herself, and even after her mistake was pointed out to her while recording the video, she still uploaded it to TikTok under her personal account. Now, if it had been an Israeli diner, I can imagine a sufficiently committed activist publishing a video of themselves damaging it in order to make a political statement, fully cognizant of the fact that doing so would make it easier for the authorities to arrest and convict her. But this woman attempted to commit a crime in order to make a political statement, failed due to mistaken identity of her victims, and even after realising her mistake, still distributed the video of her committing the crime. Not only did she commit a crime for no discernible personal or political benefit, she made a complete unforced error in distributing evidence of her committing this crime under her personal TikTok account, again for literally no benefit that I can fathom (except maybe the fleeting dopamine hit of racking up some views of her making a fool of herself).
It's a level of idiocy I simply cannot fathom. As I said last month: attempts to practise law enforcement by appealing to the rationality and common sense of criminals are doomed to failure by virtue of the fact that criminals are a group heavily selected for lacking rationality or common sense.
Your phrasing is very telling. Whatever I did. Becuase I really do get the distinct impression that whatever Israel does, people will be condemning it.
The gigantic protest movements against the country in question had begun in earnest less than a week after October 7th, well before Israel even had the opportunity to commit any war crimes. In New York, there were protests and calls to "globalise the intifada" literally the day after. (The less said about the people at these protests chanting "Allahu akbar" and "gas the Jews", the better.)
Call me crazy, but it kind of seems like at least a significant proportion of these protests have nothing to do with how Israel's military conducts itself, and more to do with the fact that Israel exists at all.
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