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ToZanarkand

Some day the dream will end

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joined 2024 March 15 18:08:08 UTC

				

User ID: 2935

ToZanarkand

Some day the dream will end

0 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2024 March 15 18:08:08 UTC

					

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User ID: 2935

Sweden as well, although it's a bit more complicated.

The Danes are smarter,

What's your basis for this? I can't imagine they're that distinct genetically.

However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments!

Very few of the political matters that most divide people resemble the sorts of questions found in the LSAT. Rather, they're issues of vibes, values and group-preferences. Using examples from the US, I don't see a large number of people changing their views on BLM, the ethics of abortion, or whether the US needs tougher border security based on having been exposed to formal logic and trained to recognise logical fallacies.

In practice, what matters is whether people find arguments persuasive. That can have quite little to do with their validity.

Good post, to which I'd add: Israel is a nuclear state, and that alone makes them worth guarding.

Honestly Trump has very solid instincts.

Bit of a late reply to this topic, but the way I'd put it is that Trump has very straightforward instincts. He'll bring up the obvious-sounding solution to most problems presented to him. This can arguably be bad in certain cases (trade deficit? massive tarrifs!) but quite positive in others like this one, where the reason the obvious solution doesn't get talked about is to a large part due to decorum and an idealistic denial of reality.

and gives you the option to put it in his butt in the second one.

Did they at least give the player a "No homo" dialogue option?

Securing Israeli interests is one of the foundational

One of the foundational values of the US is pursuing the interests of a nation that didn't exist until 172 years after the declaration of independence?

The Rules-Based International Liberal Order, to the extent that it exists, would not collapse if a state decided to strip citizenship from its members.

Ethnic cleansing is good

I don't think I'd go that far, but the Israel-Palestine issue is at the point that it's probably a good thing if "Ethnic cleansing" stops being a thought terminating cliche. By moving this possibility into the Overton window (still the extreme part of it), Palestinians might start having to reckon with the real possibility that continually starting pointless wars might soon get them punished in a way they seem to care about.

The most valuable support Israel gets is in the form of being allowed to buy US weapons. This could be counted as a form of military support, as not all nations get this privilege, but this isn't coming at US expense (quite the opposite). The US could stop providing monetary aid and Israel would still be the dominant military power in the region by some distance as long as the US didn't embargo them.

and the "greatest ally" talk.

I think they've moderated that to "greatest ally in the ME"? That's the only version I see.

Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.

This would more closely mirror the reality of the Israel-Palestine situation if the driver needed to be somewhere as a matter of life and death (disarming a missile aimed at their house/rescuing a kidnapped relative/make up your own), there was only a single route there, they'd loudly announced beforehand they would be taking this road, and yet Hamas members were hiding behind blind corners throwing children in front of the car as it approached.

In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal.

This is true of anything.

Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.

Why are the civilian deaths in Gaza closer to the bombing of Dresden in your view than the rest of the civilian deaths caused by the Allied powers in WW2? And returning to your first point:

you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.

The implication of which seems to be some version of "this is close to as bad as intending to kill them" (otherwise I'm not sure what point you were making), why would accepting the deaths of German civilians in WW2 be meaningfully less deliberate than the bombing of Dresden? What would even morally distinguish the Allied and Axis forces?

The plan to "Let them fight" keeps getting abandoned by demanding Israel stop fighting as soon as they get too close to winning

tits

Is there a motte policy on this?

I think it's more fair to say that the Democrats are a big tent coalition (like every serious party in a two-party system) of which some member groups have the sympathies you described.

You’re both describing the same thing

We're not. The difference between an intended and an unintended negative outcome, like harm to a civilian, is something reasonably young children can already intuit. There's a reason most people judge someone who accidentally runs another person over less harshly than someone who actively seeks pedestrians to drive into.

Maybe you think there's some conversion factor i.e. a single deliberately caused death is as bad as 2/5/10 unintended ones, but I'd be very surprised if you think it's 1:1.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons,

For all that people bring up the supposed different attitudes to nudity between the US and the EU I don't really get it. I live in a European country famous for its supposed sexual liberty and you would absolutely not see something like this stunt in public.

(You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.)

The deepest. Yuge.

Stop masturbating with words.

Pointing out words have meanings and that the ones you used don't match reality is not "masturbating" with words (curious expression).

If you want to mass murder people have the courage to actually say so.

Mass murder? That type of language is more masturbatory than anything I've said, and seems like an example of the non-central fallacy as it relates to Hamas members. For the avoidance of doubt, I think the murder of Hamas members is a noble goal (unless they surrender), despite the unfortunate reality of collateral civilian deaths. If you have an issue with that, then your issue might be with the nature of war itself.

How many wars are you asking for?

More than one? (Which I'm very dubious was done primarily, let alone entirely, for Israel's sake, but whatever). If the ZOG was "literally true" (and blatant about it, as you claim later on), then Israel wouldn't have 5-10 hostile regimes surrounding it that haven't been overturned.

Manipulating a country into invading another country on the other side of the world is just about the biggest show of control you can imagine.

If this were the case, they'd do it for Iran, Lebanon etc. Like, if your argument were that the ZOG was in power 2003-2009 the claim that Israel orchestrated the Iraq war would at least be in service of your position, but if they've been pulling the strings since and before, you'd expect them to use that control to deal with their current threats.

It's followed closely by manipulating a country into harassing countries on the other side of the world, which we see with Syria and Iran.

So is the claim that the US only has issues with Syria and Iran (which overthrew the US-backed Shah) because Israel keeps dragging them in? But then why would the US not have kept the Israel-friendly Shah in power (the revolution fits comfortably into the supposed ZOG window)? Why would Obama not intervene in Syria after chemical weapons were used? Why would Obama and Biden have been so pro Iran-rapprochement? Etc.

I mean, maybe I'm being autistic and interpreting too literally your earlier claim that

I don't know how it's possible for the word ZOG to be problematized like it's some crazy, loopy theory when in the case of the US, it's literally true.

but again, if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests and have been since the mid 20th century, then Israel wouldn't face any threats at all (or at the very least, far fewer). Is what I just described your position, or have I misinterpreted it?

It is basically impossible to read a flagship Australian newspaper without hearing about how awful it is that we're not favouring Israel enough. Day in and day out.

I'll take your word for it. I'd suggest trying a flagship newspaper in the US or UK, where leftist/centrist publications (so most of them) usually consider it awful that the US/UK/whoever isn't favouring Palestine enough.

There is nothing shadowy about the cabal, it's blatant. Kissinger was right out there in the open sending weapons to Israel. The USS Liberty was immediately swept under the carpet in '67 despite being a very serious military incident. You have all these US officials boasting about how their number one goal is to work with Israel. Pelosi talks about how even if the Capitol were razed, there would still be cooperation with Israel. Trump complains about how Israel used to totally control the US congress and now that control has withered away.

A blatant cabal would be politicians saying right there in the open that Israel's interests take precedence over the US'. No one says that (Trump's statements sort of come close, but he says all sorts of exaggerated bs). The rest of the stuff you described is mostly standard for allies. If Japan accidentally sank a US warship there wouldn't be an immediate cessation of the alliance. If you asked Pelosi about whether the US would still be allies with the UK if the capital was razed she'd probably say yes.

Why did the Arab states turn to the Soviet cause in the first place? Because they wanted weapons to attack Israel with and the US was unwilling to provide them, while the Soviets would.

The Arabs turned to the Soviets for a whole host of reasons, including Arab nationalism/Socialism, anti-colonialism etc. As I understand it the first Soviet arms delivery to Egypt happened in 1955, several years before and orders of magnitude higher in value than the first US military aid to Israel in 1959. So the US wasn't giving military aid to Israel either at the time the Arabs turned to the Soviets.

AIPAC boasting about 95% of its candidates winning their elections is not necessarily good for US interests.

Yeah that's a fair position, as is debating the value of the Israeli alliance generally (fwiw I think Republicans over-value Israel and Democrats under-value, but that's another discussion) but this seems like the Motte to the Bailey of "everything we do is determined by Israeli interests", which is Israel-derangement-syndrome.

Rising temperatures and water shortages might do that work first. Israel is the only nation in the region with the type of HC to deal with these issues.

Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory.

Eh, that's not wholly fair. Plenty of things that just about every economist agrees with, such as rent control being bad in the long term, keep being proved to be true.

The main problem with economics is that you can't run nation-wide, years-long controlled experiments to test theories the same way you can with sciences. That doesn't make the field worthless, just harder to draw conclusions from.

Sorry for discrediting myself by describing killing a couple hundred thousand people out of a population of 2 million as genocide.

Making up numbers in order to describe something as a genocide is indeed discrediting.

Eager to hear more of your genocide-free strategy of starving them instead and bombing those “meat shields”

Feel free to look at any war in history fought against a nation like Gaza that has declared total war on you (and insists it will never stop). To consider it unsporting - whoops, I meant genocidal - of a nation to not want to send thousands of trucks of supplies to its enemy demonstrates a lack of understanding of how war works or a very particular grudge against Israel.

European countries have free speech norms (a non-arbitrary example) yet the fact that psychos will semi-reliably kill you for drawing Mohammed has set a new taboo. Meanwhile, other groups that theoretically have more power have allowed the statues of their great men and icons of their people to get torn down and tabooed even when it makes no sense.

I don't see any coherent throughline in a lot of the things that happen, but they happen anyway because one party imposes its will.

I think these examples misunderstand who actually has power and what they want. The will being imposed here is not that of Muslims in Europe (who would have no recourse if TPTB told them to pack this shit in and actually enforced this) but that of the urban/political elite who gain status by openly deferring to the wishes of violent third-worldists. Broadly speaking, they don't identify with the great men of their history and people.