Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
More were killed by Israel just in 2022
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
and many more in 2021
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Right; the Geneva Conventions aren't meant to turn men into angels. They're supposed to be clear rules of the road so that everyone knows what to expect if they behave in a particular way. If people elect not to behave in the specified ways, they don't get the benefit of those clear rules. It's really simple at root.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack?
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
NB, there's provisions in the Geneva Convention, IIRC, for spontaneous resistance to an occupying force.
Right, that provision provides as follows:
ART. 4. — A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
...
6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
Hamas and Hezbollah emphatically do not qualify under this paragraph, as they are pre-existing organizations which do organize themselves into regular units, e.g. Hamas's "Qassam Brigades" and Hezbollah's various specialized units such as the "Radwan Force," yet still engage in combat without uniforms or otherwise making themselves distinct from civilians, among other violations. Also, they aren't spontaneously taking up arms because they're drawing from long-established and disguised central arms depots, in a conflict they started.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I'm talking about in like the 60's-90's.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.
Specifically the men in these demographics. The gender gap is turning reciprocal.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
classic guerilla warfare.
Yes, and the traditional penalty for guerillas, francs tireurs, and partisans is summary execution without benefit of trial.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The big trend with the GWB was the abolishment of the rules of war. There were no prisoners of war, only terrorists who can be tortured in any which way.
Were the people captured while acting as uniformed members of a recognized belligerent state's regular military? If not (and not within a few closely-associated civilian professions like military sutlers and contractors), they're not legally POWs under the Geneva Conventions. And even then, the Convention does not bar prosecution of POWs for acts which contravene the laws of war, such as indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
Pashtuns can't have any reason to oppose the Afghan government.
They absolutely can - they're just not POWs when they're captured fighting out of uniform, or attacking civilians; they're insurgents/terrorists.
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict.
Sure, that's a moral claim. They can fight if they want to. But if they choose to fight, they then can't complain about the consequences of the other party fighting too.
They are not terrorists, they are armed combatants participating in an armed conflict.
They are not fighting in uniform so as to readily distinguish themselves from the civilian population, and are engaging in indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
No, there is a specific definition of who gets protection under the convention as a lawful combatant. Hamas and Hezbollah fighters do not qualify.
Israel is clearly trying to depopulate Gaza in order to steal the land.
Low-effort mindreading.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
However, I also think that this organisation (UNWRA plays an important role in securing basic humanitarian necessities to the people in Gaza.
Hamas regularly hijacks and diverts those shipments to its own use instead of allowing the supplies to go to civilians, and fires at the ones too protected for it to hijack.
UNWRA, consistent with an organization which has been thoroughly suborned by Hamas, denied this was happening.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
there's space for a leaner probably meaner WaPo.
Historically, the WaPo had a reputation as the society/gossip/trade publication for the federal government. There's definitely room for a paper doing that.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Campaign rhetoric? sure. But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi? Can somebody help me understand the claim? Not necessarily the veracity, but what the substantative argument is. . . . Can anyone lay out the argument and why Trump is Hitler sufficiently captures a real claim about the dangers of his presidency. (Again not looking for veracity, I'm trying to understand what the claim means.)
At the risk of being glib, Orwell already explained this: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”. They're just screaming "ORANGE MAN BAD" in the most powerful imagery they can think of.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
De gustibus nil est disputandum. shrug
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I kinda wanted Trump to go full-bore off on that tangent about concrete because Rogan is at his best when he facilitates his guest in talking about something they know about and have enthusiasm for, and I really think Trump cares way more about concrete than he does about running the federal government.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
To be fair, comedians literally have as a job description "tell narratively-interesting and humorous stories in as economical, effective, and entertaining a manner as possible." It's useful for politicians to also have this skill, but they're not as hyper-selected for this trait as comedians.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
to make all of her policy platform stillborn.
If the last few presidential terms have taught us anything, it's that the executive branch retains extremely significant discretion to remake policy without legislative say so, precisely because the legislature has been asleep at the switch for a generation. The courts have clawed back some of that power, but the Biden immigration influx was a policy choice implemented solely by executive fiat, as was student loan debt relief (which was reimplemented in a lesser form after Scotus struck it down the first time), as was the seeding of the "whole of government" with DEI practices and racial set-asides.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?
No, but keeping these failures in the popular consciousness and closely-tied to the respective ideologies plays a major part in stripping them of moral authority and discrediting their challenges to the moral narrative of liberalism.
I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.
To knock them off their moral pedestal and assumption that their moral instincts will always result in "justice" and people who have different instincts are necessarily evil.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The LA Time is not a Trumpy paper. There's actually interesting family drama between the owner - an immigrant South African/Chinese surgeon and pharmaceutical inventor who is reputed to just want to get mainstream influence and respect, and his VERY limousine-liberal/progressive daughter Nika. Nika had initially taken a heavy hand in pushing news coverage at the LAT in a very progressive "abolish the police" direction, but there has been some backlash. Her dad does not share her ideological priors, it seems.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not.
So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says? This whole thing is just the biggest case of typical mind fallacy and projection?!?
I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Some endowment donations are subject to that tight of a restriction, sure. However, there are also unrestricted donations which may be put towards general educational purposes, and donations whose restrictions are much more flexible (for example, a donation restricted to the support of a school's history department generally could likely be used for just about anything - professor salaries, administrative support, facilities maintenance, student scholarships/grants, archival and research purchases, etc.)
Of course, far more common is a restriction that the principal of an endowment can't be spent; only the profits flowing from investment of that principal, which makes endowment absolute numbers a bit deceptive. Given the speed with which endowments have been growing recently, I'm not that worried about this.
Ultimately, colleges and universities are known for being masterful in manipulating bureaucratic processes to achieve their desired results, no matter what the black letter law may say (see, e.g. the lengths administrations have gone to in order to enshrine race-based preferences in admissions). I'm confident that they'd find a way to put that money to real productive work if they had to.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.
As of the end of FY 2021, American college and university endowments totaled over $927 billion, up 34% from $691 billion at the start of the fiscal year. That slightly outpaced the S&P 500's growth during the same period, which was only up 26%. Even if FY 2022 and 2023 weren't quite as bumper years, the tertiary education system in the U.S. undoubtedly has at least $1 trillion in the bank, not to mention that most of the top research universities are also state institutions, with direct support from state-level taxpayers.
There's plenty of money to go around.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Try it and report back. Perhaps this is one of those "shit tests" I hear so much from the Red Pill folks about.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Words cannot overstate how much a significant chunk of the GOP base gets the ick over Ted Cruz. There's a reason he's running behind Trump and in a dogfight for re-election in Texas.
You're right, I allowed myself to be distracted by you - after all, the original discussion was over whether or not some heated statements made by a random Israeli after 10/7 meant the entire post-10/7 conflict in Gaza was a sinister plot for Israelis to expropriate Gazan land. So good job; I got snookered.
But even here you're wrong; the unprovoked nature of the 10/7 attack, as well as its breadth and premeditated objectives to deliberately harm Israeli civilians who had done nothing to Gazans, are what justify the Israeli response and anger. It's not some cold math over how many deaths can be dealt out tit-for-tat, which again is not used by ANYONE in any other conflict because it's manifestly silly and has nothing to do with the actual objectives of either party to the conflict.
Nope. Words have meanings.
This is what they are actually doing, probably to their detriment. See, e.g. the analysis of John Spencer, an instructor in urban warfare at West Point.
"Obeying basic laws and norms of war" is not a demand for "surgical" precision. If Hamas can't measure up to the IDF conventionally, perhaps that's a big sign that armed combat is counterproductive to their political aims.
Not a valid basis to wage war or attack random civilians.
Interesting way to describe the outcome of a lawsuit, but even taking the Palestinian argument at face value it's still not a valid reason to wage war or attack random civilians.
Then you should probably have used a source that actually supported what you're claiming, instead of one that does not.
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