Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship.
This is a deep and incorrect elision of the same process - the denigrating and hollowing of republican citizenship into imperial subjection - that I am arguing is happening here, today. The socii did not participate in the roman centuriate assembly or plebeian councils, did not serve in roman offices or have any say in roman foreign policy, despite making up at times at clear majorities of roman armed manpower; in fact, the original premise of their becoming socii was that rome would not interfere in their cities' internal affairs at all, in exchange for a territorial guarantee and military mutual aid. In practice, this confederal relationship broke down and Rome did indeed start meddling in the internal affairs of the socii, and the legal distinctions between the various cities began to chafe as rome grew prosperous off war proceeds while the socii were left having to deal with trade barriers that blocked their ability to share in those rewards. By the time of the principate and empire, roman "citizenship" was a very different, much diluted thing.
French foreign legion, RPG, Israel
Of your other examples, it's telling that two are entirely inapposite - one isn't a country but instead a quasi-penal military unit, another is entirely fictional - and the third literally has a religious requirement for naturalization (at least of the type you're discussing). Far closer to my point than yours.
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream.
The term "American dream" is itself an artifact of the modern progressive era, with basically no resonance at all before that (with the exception of a tiny little bump in the years immediately surrounding the founding).
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
Er?
when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.
Like I said...there's a fight. And whoever wins, wins. That's not a tremendously happy answer, but I think it's fairly descriptively accurate, no?
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly?
This is the price we pay for being a propositional nation; the proposition changes as the populace does...when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
This idea has been played with. Personally, I liked the resulting comic series, but YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
Because people lie when you accuse them of something that makes them look bad. It's practically a universal response.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
This is true for American citizens, but the fact that we're even considering applying it to non-citizens shows just how much the concept of "citizenship" has decayed. It also, incidentally, shows how little anyone actually means it when they say America is a "creedal" or "propositional" nation. If citizenship is not a matter of ethnic belonging (i.e. an intersection of familial and cultural ties), it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in or, at the minimum, allowed the rights and duties of citizenship.
As I've quoted before, GK Chesterton wrote about how this used to work in America, before our imperial phase:
The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 8-9 (boldface added for emphasis).
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
I have some friends in this category. They’re miserable.
Same, all the moreso because if and when they do manage to find someone who ostensibly wants a strait-laced monogamous relationship, the dominant gay culture is constantly shoving extra-relationship sex into their faces, leading to rampant cheating and drama and relationship blow-ups/divorce.
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
If your goal is the support of civilization - and particularly european-derived civilization - and the flourishing of european-descended individuals, that may not be the best example to cite.
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
Israel is a liberal & open democracy.
Ehhhhhhhh...it's definitely both of those things when compared to its regional neighbors, but in any sort of absolute ranking it has all sorts of problems; a crazy runaway judiciary, excessive military entanglement in politics, endemic public corruption, etc.
And yet lots of people keep covering such things up and not freaking out and leaking them out of moral outrage.
Supah_Schmendrick
21d ago
The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.
Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
How are a bunch of dudes in pickup trucks and paragliders ever, EVER going to credibly threaten one of the most sophisticated armies on planet earth?
You say this like we didn't just have the Afghan war, with the US military fighting dudes in pickup trucks and with AKs and jerry-rigged IEDs.
Also, Israel is tiny It's literally about 9 miles wide from the border to the sea at one point, and it's only 20 miles from Tel Aviv to the border. How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Are the descendents of the Sudeten Germans and other Ostdeutsch who were ethnically cleansed out of eastern europe into Germany after WWII still living in refugee camps? Of course not. Population exchange is traumatic, but people can get on with their lives afterwards. The current never-ending simmer of terrorism and oppression is just categorically worse.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2),
The very first bullet point sub-head on your second link disproves your claim: "State Department disputes findings, cites video evidence of Hamas looting"
Also, there's plenty of mainstream coverage indicating that Hamas has been heavily involved in receiving food "aid" - look at this article from November last year, which outright admits:
Hamas' efforts to take a lead in securing aid supplies point to the difficulties Israel will face in a post-war Gaza, with few obvious alternatives to a group it has been trying to destroy for over a year and which it says can have no governing role. . . .
The new anti-looting force, formed of well-equipped fighters from Hamas and allied groups, has been named "The Popular and Revolutionary Committees" and is ready to open fire on hijackers who do not surrender, one of the sources, a Hamas government official, said. The official, who declined to be named because Hamas would not authorise him to speak about it, said the group operated across central and southern Gaza and had carried out at least 15 missions so far, including killing some armed gangsters.
They'll admit that Hamas is taking the aid meant for civilians if they can use Russell conjugation to make it sound pleasant - "securing aid supplies [from hijackers]" but when someone actually carries that thought through to its obvious and logical conclusion - that a combatant organization is taking aid meant for civilians - nope, no evidence!
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Unless it is Israel's intention to starve everyone in Gaza to death how does their current strategy deal with Hamas?
They are attempting to replace an ineffective aid stream that primarily benefits Hamas via confiscation and resale (UN channels) with another ineffective aid stream that attempts to cut out Hamas and provide aid directly to civilians (GHF aid, guarded by IDF and/or contractors). The goal is denying food aid to actual combatants (Hamas) and also denying combatants the ability to monetize aid by confiscating it and reselling it to the population, providing the combatants extra income and resources with which to carry on resistance.
It's not a complicated strategy.
It is not even clear to me that would be sufficient to end the threat of Hamas, as an organization, to Israel.
You are correct; Hamas is just the Gaza branch of the broader Muslim Brotherhood, which has many other branches in many other arab/islamicate countries. However, Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and the quasi-sovereign entity which attacked Israel on 10/7, therefore Israel's effort is concentrated against them. Other areas with Muslim Brotherhood parties which have not conducted such hostilities (e.g. the West Bank) are not subject to military operations.
Is literally ever member of Hamas in Gaza?
No, a bunch of them are sitting on stolen billions and living in Qatar and other luxe gulf states.
No one to pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone?
No, but if Israel were to target "everyone who might pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone" then you'd fault them for carrying on a regional rather than a local genocide; Catch-22 and bad-faith criticism.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
I doubt it; IIRC the beepers were used to "call up" Hezbollah members for service. If Hezbollah was already engaged in an all-out invasion of northern Israel as envisaged/desired by Hamas, there likely would have been no need to use/carry the beepers after the fighters had assembled and gone into combat.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it
Correct, this is what a democratic theory of sovereignty means and has always meant since the French revolution at least. If the people are responsible for empowering their government, then if a country aggresses, the people are responsible for that too.
If you don't want your people to suffer the consequences of war, don't start one. It's really not complicated.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.
And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.
Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal.
Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.
While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.
Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.
In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.
Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Given that IDF service is mandatory for everyone except the haredim, asking an Israeli about their opinion on the IDF is literally "do you like yourself and your neighbors?" - not terribly meaningful, or a useful reflection of Israeli opinion on state policy.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil.
As I understand it, the original conception for Oct. 7 was a surprise Hamas break-out, coupled with a simultaneous large-scale Hezbollah offensive, would pincer Israel and overwhelm its local defenses, potentially sufficiently to spark sympathetic uprisings in the West Bank or among Israeli arabs as well.
Notably, the Hezbollah component of the attack didn't happen, and good for the Israelis that it didn't because in terms of raw numbers of fighters and weapons, Hezbollah had a lot more than Hamas (prior to Operation Grim Beeper and collateral airstrikes, at least).
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.
Except that's a meaningful statement - "the acts of war undertaken so far have been insufficient to compel a favorable political resolution" - just glibly phrased.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
If you are the Israeli government, then yes, the lives of your citizens are more important than the lives of an adversary. That's what it means to be a nation-state.
Same for the US. I would expect the American government to prioritize the lives of Americans held abroad above the lives of citizens of enemy - or even of third party neutral - countries.
Is this actually true? I fully accept that prohibition lowers the general public's ability to access the prohibited substance (e.g., alcohol prohibition actually lowered drinking significantly and permanently changed U.S. drinking culture), but is there any evidence that it significantly impacts illicit dealing in the prohibited/regulated substance?
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