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The superior communities may be the result of the psychological changes brought about from belief in a life to come, with all of its contingent reinforcements and punishments
There is some good here. But the problem with over-prioritizing symbolism is that it weakens the power of the original meaning. For instance, making “Lord” into only an imagined presence we speak to weakens the significance of talking to your Lord. In antiquity, talking to your Lord was a big deal — the Lord controlled your entire realm, not to mention your destiny. For Christians, Lord was the established authority with maximum culturally-informed value judgments which were deeply internalized (to describe it as scientifically as possible). If the Lord is defined as a presence we imagine, and this presence is only an abstractly conceptualized ground of being, then we have lost considerable motivation to pray or act righteously. We are just playing pretend — and perhaps we always are — but the pretend isn’t even dramatic. The dramatic pull is gone. The totalizing, moralizing vibe is gone. And it risks becoming woefully subjective, and it also risks toppling like the Tower of Babel — we can’t build upon the rock of Christ if each person’s Christ is different.
I mean imagine you’re at some mystical Christian gathering, and you’re crying because the weight of your sin is too strong and you don’t want to betray your savior — how can the “mystic” answer? “Whoa, you’re taking this imagined presence thing really seriously…” Or who is going to donate their wealth over an “imagined presence”? It lacks force.
What I think is a better solution here, is not to say “Lord is imagined”, but to say that these words are the only way we can access reality — particularly a socialized, moral, emotional reality. By socialized, I mean both “discussing complex spiritual reality within a shared language and framework” and “with the cooperative presuppositions which answer myriad collective action concerns”. These words act as an interface by which we access the divine. On the human-level, then, you really do have a Lord with whom all the poetic elaborations of creation and judgment are solidly true. On the material-level, there is no Lord. Is this such a difficult leap to make? I don’t think so; after all, the Christian must believe that the bread (material) becomes the flesh and blood of the Lord (spiritual) within a shared social ecosystem designed toward moral reinforcement.
Now, a pious Christian does use imagination in prayer: perhaps they kneel, perhaps they look up, perhaps they repeat some words which cement His dominion over all things (the earth is God’s footstool). But they use imagination only to elaborate and feel the beliefs or dogmas that they hold. They are hallowing the name of God and bidding the Kingdom come. They do this because they believe the consequences are important. If everything is symbols all the way down, then what is the importance of it all? You need something which roots the urgency and significance of the quest. Otherwise you’re just satisfying your own limited ego or whim, you’re not actually involved in making the world better or anything good. Why not just play Dungeons & Dragons, or WoW? Why not just talk to ChatGPT? So any religious quest needs to be rooted in a totalizing importance. And there are actually decent ways to combine it with secular importance, but traditionally what religion does is get you into an environment where they can propagandize their root concerns to you: the wrath of God is coming, we slew God’s Son; God’s Son came to forgive us and save us from evil; there is an eternal punishment and an eternal abode for the righteous. Etc. Maybe they have the children sing about the earth burning in smoke. Maybe you are peer-evaluated by your perceived faith and banished for your doubt.
A purely symbolic religion will not get martyrdom like this:
I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep [in death], I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Now I begin to be a disciple. And let no one, of things visible or invisible, envy me that I should attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.
All the pleasures of the world, and all the kingdoms of this earth, shall profit me nothing. It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth. For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul? Him I seek, who died for us: Him I desire, who rose again for our sake. This is the gain which is laid up for me. Pardon me, brethren: do not hinder me from living, do not wish to keep me in a state of death; and while I desire to belong to God, do not give me over to the world. Allow me to obtain pure light: when I have gone there, I shall indeed be a man of God. Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God. If any one has Him within himself, let him consider what I desire, and let him have sympathy with me, as knowing how I am straitened.
My love has been crucified, and there is no fire in me desiring to be fed; but there is within me a water that lives and speaks, saying to me inwardly, Come to the Father. I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David and Abraham; and I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.
I like Jonathan Pageau but his writings suffer this same problem. A person just isn’t moved by knowing symbols, or poems, or anything clever. If you have 1000 symbols versus 1 “this man died to save the world and now waits for you”, you are going to be changed from the simple non-symbolic thing. And I enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s thoughts on the Old Testament, but again this has the same problem — JBP can’t even admit to being a Christian in an argument with a teenager. And lastly, around Christ’s time you had the Alexandrian school of Philo, and they also doubted the real body of Christ, and they wrote thousands of pages allegorizing the Old Testament with symbols. And it’s a pleasant read, but it’s worthless and doesn’t actually do anything.
It would be like saying there’s a sprawling tunnel system beneath Manhattan which America uses as their primary war room. The Pentagon isn’t even in the middle of DC, let alone under the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Given that Israel hides their military command center under the heart of Tel Aviv, their most densely-populated city, how many Israeli civilians is Iran justified to bomb in their attempt to destroy this sprawling system?
This room is the nerve center of a bunker dubbed the “Fortress of Zion,” a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. It is designed to command the kind of high-tech air wars that have supplanted ground invasions fought by tanks and infantry battalions.
When Israel decided to launch its air assault on Gaza, thousands from military headquarters above ground joined the bunker. Also present were members of intelligence agencies like the Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, and Foreign Ministry and police representatives.
Obviously, it is not Iran’s fault that Israel hides their command center among civilians; neither is it Iran’s fault that Israel does not publish the exact coordinates of each room of the base. It would appear that Iran is justified to inflict somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 civilian casualties in Israel in their pursuit to reach the Israeli leadership. At least, going by the normative Hamas:civilian casualty ratio which Israel has defended since the Gaza war began.
Channel 12 and two separate journalists reporting what the IDF told them makes it more probable that the IDF told them something than that these three journalists are lying
It does not appear to be truthful reporting. American officials took the unusual step of announcing on several occasions that America is not on board with the attack. The IDF is telling reporters that they are coordinating with America. Unless the journalist is lying about what the IDF stated to them: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-expects-operation-against-iran-to-last-for-several-days/
Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long
The “you’ve said something about Israel? — how dare you criticize every Jew in the world, I can’t believe you just quoted the elders of Zion!” that you see by the Israel crowd hasn’t been persuasive to normal people for many years, and has been used for decades. At this point it just signals your support for Israel. It is more dignified to just post the 🇮🇱 emoji.
It’s reported that the IDF is claiming they are coordinating its actions with America
Our greatest ally is now putting American lives in danger by publishing that America was complicit in the attack
From my limited experience with her online presence, she effectively promotes her lifestyle with sex and buzzwords. If she were 50 years old, no one would latch onto her ideology. She is using the inherent weakness of men to manipulate them into a poor way of life, when influencing women to her life with the attention she receives. The reason she should be shamed (ie pointedly negatively evaluated) is that the end result of her lifestyle is a worse world. It’s bad for the people who fall for it and society at large. We don’t want a society where %s of high IQ tech guys have a TFR of 0.25. We don’t want online discourse increasingly sex-obsessed. We want pair-bonds and commitment and emotional stability which children absorb at a young age.
These cucks are self-selecting out of the gene pool
An optimal society is one where the high IQ protects the midwit with his intellect and the midwit protects the high IQ with his intuition. Everyone deserves greater wellbeing, even Aella when she deletes her account. Yet this is a case where even the high IQ can forecast the bad second-order consequences of her lifestyle. Just trivial familiarization with the hedonic treadmill will explain why “get everyone increasingly sensitive to sexual pleasure and talking about sex and seeking more of its pleasure” is bad. It would be better to run a pro-smoking account. Giving up polyamory isn’t even giving up pleasure but just stopping a downward spiral of increased sexualization. (And she can do whatever she wants in private, right; it’s the promotion that’s bad, it’s not about policing her own private failings which everyone has — it’s about not increasing it in the future generations)
This is just spiritualizing Slick’s antisociality. (Surely we can deadname an influential rationalist court prostitute when her name has so much metaphorical import?). Traditionally, there are two kinds of women that men have nothing but respect and reverence toward: committed virgins and faithful mothers. No normal man feels resentment to these women. There’s a reason Koreans worship K-Pop idols only when they know they aren’t having sex, and then lash out when they do have sex. Virgins and mothers are entirely outside the sociosexual competition. A women having sex but not with you is usually the thing that breeds resentment in men. But Slick’s lifestyle of having sex with everyone is inviolable to any resentment based on envy. No same man envies the man paying for a prostitute. She is just gross.
I think people should try and cool their emotions about her. - just chill? Live and let live.
Well, who gets to let their impulses run wild? I enjoy the story of Saint Joan of Arc beating the prostitutes out of her military camp. This fills me with a pleasure that is both more abiding and more prosocial than Slick’s. Why not let the righteous “live and let live”? Who gets to live without stress and vexation, the righteous or the degenerate? Okay, “it’s illegal to do that”, we can imagine a world where it’s not, but in any case we can at least rebuke her. And rebuking her is to chill, because it satisfies the righteous person’s sense of morality.
She has honest to god genuine curiosity
Generally people stop being praised for curiosity by their teen years. This is an example of the perverse hijacking of attention that Slick is able to accomplish. She is treated online like someone who is not actually an adult with moral reasoning, but someone who deserves constant coddling.
I think there is still value to this sort of “illogical prayer”. Imagine you want to run a marathon. If you’re constrained to logic, then you can pray for the spirit (mood / feeling / aim) to practice every day; the praying would help to increase salience and craving for the activity. But you can also enter into the post-logical realm: you can believe that God guarantees that you will complete a marathon, and actually changes reality provided that you practice. And now you have no wavering or double-mindedness about your practice and pursuit. There’s now no room for doubt about whether you obtain it, it’s just a matter of when. It’s hard to convey this beneficial goal certainty without eschewing logic, but you see it in a lot of high-level performers across domains, eg Magnus Carlsen saying that the optimal mindset for chess is “between delusional and confident”. It seems essential for the instrumentalization of cognition toward a goal.
Humans need to be certain that they will accomplish a goal and “God will make it so” is no less delusional than “I simply believe it” or “if you believe you will achieve” (at the very least, religious language is more poetic). But the utility of prayer is more clear when you factor in more variables: someone is more likely to take the time to pray when they believe (when they know) that they will be heard, answered, and gifted something materially. It’s easier on the mind and increases interest. “My act of praying gives myself a spirit” turns a person into an actor playing a part. “My loving Father is eager to give me my request and only asks for prayer and practice, that I prove my interest and allegiance” turns someone into a social animal, a human. It’s simpler, there’s no pretending. And it activates much more cognition and interest, because every time you pray you are speaking to the maker of all things and the ruler of time. That dogma itself will make the content of your prayer more striking in your mind, increasing the chance of it occurring.
As for the problem of evil, my view is firmly in the minority but I believe in a sovereign force of evil which evades the problem completely. From the Wisdom of Solomon:
God did not make death. For he fashioned all things that they might have being, and the creatures of the world are wholesome […] It was the wicked who with hands and words invited death, considered it a friend, and pined for it, and made a covenant with it […] God formed us to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made us. But by the envy* of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are allied with him experience it.
I read this as a sovereign force of evil always existing, later in the form of the devil, who unleashed death when our archetypal ancestors disobeyed the Good in paradise. The evil in the world is both due to evil as a force and mankind’s own alliance with it (Adam isn’t just “first human”, but we all existed in Adam and we inherit his temperament etc). This is very satisfying. God has ultimate control over everything in the end, and ultimate control over the Good, but there currently and forever was a sovereign evil force. Every attempt to make God all-powerful including over evil is ultimately making Him less moral and less loving.
In my opinion, the attacks on her are warranted and she deserves even harsher social ostracization. Any pressure that a person can legally apply against her is justified. She is a force for evil in the world. The harm she causes the country is worse than the harm of a murderer.
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She promotes a lifestyle that is highly anti-natal, and she pushes it against a high-iq people population (rationalists) who should be having more children. These high-iq people almost always have a cognitive vulnerability of poor intuition regarding social consequences.
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She promotes a lifestyle that damages wellbeing. Polyamory is not conducive to longterm wellbeing.
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She pollutes discourse by turning everything into sex and fetishes. All e-whores really need to be excluded from online discourse.
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Her public ideas are intuitively disgusting to normal people, and disgust is an objectively painful sensation, meaning every day she issues forth more and more pain in the world.
I do not like the idea that someone can push a horrific way of life and we have to accept this because they are “nice”. It doesn’t matter how nice you are if you’re telling people to eat lead paint chips. She is evil because the consequences of what she promotes is evil. And loudly calling that out is the whole point of shame. Shame is just the feeling of being negatively evaluated by peers. Aella needs to be continually negatively-evaluated until she stops promoting an ugly lifestyle to our economically valuable cognitively-vulnerable population.
From a non-Mormon perspective, the sophisticated argument for prayer is that it changes a person’s disposition or spirit, and that this is what it means to receive something from God. This would have especially strong results where the desired object is itself a change of disposition, eg the addiction OP mentions. How could prayer help or cure addiction? Addiction entails the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure goes against one’s own social, prosocial, identity-determined goals. God solidifies a person’s social identity in ways impossible to accomplish with secular language or materialist understanding alone, for a variety of psychological reasons. Prayer works to recollect and elaborate upon social identity. It makes prosocial decisions salient and forefront, and even existentially significant. It involves an omnipresent social superior, social confident, and social lover. Many more things can be said about this. But there’s a reason even Huberman the neuroscientist prays every day.
The statistical evidence that prayer works is that religious people, especially those who pray to a loving God, have greater wellbeing and are protected against addiction. Really, all that we want at the end of the day is greater wellbeing. So it works in toto. If establishing prayer in your life is more conducive to your happiness than otherwise, then it is established that prayer works and ought to be done, as any reasonable organism seeks greater wellbeing.
Regarding disasters —
There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
Unsophisticated shepherds dealing with unsophisticated dangerous feral sheep have often claimed that natural disasters are allowed by God or are the punishment of God. This is to promote society-wide prosocial behavior in an efficient way. But it is not the case.
How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out
Many, but they die in hope and conversation with their perfect Love One. The alternative is less prayer is unlikely to be more conducive to success and wellbeing. But the advice should never be “only pray” — of course you do everything else, but you also pray.
tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks ford a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
I know about the DNA research but the average Hasidic Jew still looks more pale than the average Italian (Hasidim being a good example of “pure Ashkenazim”)
It’s said that the reason Northern European Ashkenazim often have light eyes and light skin is because these genes were selected for over ~1000 years. Doesn’t this mean that the health consequences of inadequate vitamin D are more serious than commonly considered? Given that the predominant darker skin tones must have been significantly selected against. And doesn’t this poke a hole in the theory that pale skin was sexually selected, given that Ashkenazim marriage patterns were mostly predicated on business ties and rabbinical performance, rather than an individual’s own tastes?
Just speculating, but provided that you already appreciate drawings and can distinguish between better and worse drawings, it should simply be a matter of
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imitate technique 1
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recreate technique 1 in varied contexts and applications
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recreate technique 1 in novel scenarios once general applications have been mastered
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be able to assess your ability to perform technique 1 by imagining it as someone else’s work
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do the same for techniques 2-9999
I don’t actually think there is a relationship between “visual reality” and drawing, because the most prized drawings in different cultures do not depict reality but instead “signal” what the mind considers significant information according to the culture. Even the “realistic” renaissance drawings are only emphasizing particular aspects
Suppose you were the de facto “leader” of a large progressive social network in real life. You have heard frightening accounts from other social networks, where members have damaged the health of the network through antisocial behavior. Sometimes this leads to its destruction. Maybe they redirected all the attention in the group toward their own plight or pet cause; maybe they mistook an occasional unkind word for deep prejudice and tried to alienate members; maybe they become a roommate and stop paying the rent; maybe they make unreasonable demands, ruining the dynamic of the network; maybe they constantly guilt and catastrophize, ruining the enjoyment and fluidity required to motivate social activity. What norms would you put in place to exclude these antisocial individuals from social events and social spaces?
Hard Difficulty:
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Can’t use any ideological test
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Can’t judge by appearance
Legendary Difficulty:
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Can’t judge by speech pattern
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Can’t use any explicit social hierarchy, but can only filter or weed out antisocial members through group habits and group norms
Speaking of which, I find Bernard Kerik’s recent death suspicious. It comes out that he lobbies for Qatar and within a week he is hospitalized for heart issues, dying a month later, with no prior history of heart issues.
We have polling done on actual American soldiers in the middle of the war. Only 25% hated German soldiers. [I may have written “Nazis” above but the prompt says German soldiers.] Only 29% wanted to restrict aid, mid-war. I don’t know why this wouldn’t constitute a disproof. Would everyone say the same as Israelis? American soldiers fighting actual Nazis did not say the same things about German soldiers, let alone civilians.
The normals were given the questionnaires during the first 2 weeks of April, just as the major offensive was beginning which was to knock the Germans out of the war in Italy. All the men knew about the approaching offensive, and it is believed that the general expectation was that a tough fight was ahead
What the influential Smotrich had to say just a few days ago
The minimum [aid] required will reach the population, simply so the world doesn’t stop us
pressure must also be managed carefully so it doesn’t blow up in our faces. When the IDF returned in recent days to maneuver with full force to conquer the Gaza Strip, moving the population from areas where there was some food, our greatest allies in the world—those who support us, who understand we cannot stop short of total victory and the destruction of Hamas—asked us to help them help us and refute the lies about starvation. We need to do this. Without it, we simply won’t be able to stop and win
What will come in the coming days is minimal. A few bakeries distributing pita bread to people at public kitchens providing a daily cooked meal. Civilians will receive a pita and a plate of food, and that’s it. That’s exactly what we see in the videos—people standing in line, waiting for a plate of soup to be poured. This doesn’t reach Hamas, and it allows civilians to eat and our allies in the world to continue providing us with an international shield against the Security Council and The Hague
https://youtube.com/watch?v=STymrqvry2k
You can plug this into a program that converts subtitles into text and then translate it
From the survey —
To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative
This isn't just asking, "do you affirm stories from sacred scripture", it's specifying that it would involve "killing all inhabitants" of a conquered city. Israelis, being familiar with the story of Jericho, would know that this involve killing everyone:
At the edge of the sword they devoted to destruction everything in the city-man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.
Israeli politicians have brought up the Book of Joshua before in their treatment of Gazans. And this shift precedes the war by many years. From 2017: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-05-16/ty-article/.premium/why-religious-zionism-is-growing-darker/0000017f-e13a-d804-ad7f-f1faf5f90000
Under the plan, the Palestinians will be given three choices to leave the country; to live in Israel with the status of "resident alien," because, as Smotrich made sure to note, "according to Jewish law there must always be some inferiority," or to resist, "and then the Israel Defense Forces will know what to do." When the deputy Knesset speaker was asked if he intended to wipe out whole families, including women and children, Smotrich replied, "In war, as in war."
Smotrich presented the Book of Joshua as the source for his remarks. According to the Midrash, Joshua sent the residents of the land of Canaan three letters in which he set out the three aforementioned conditions. Maimonides explains that if the non-Jews do not flee, they must have limitations imposed on them "so they should be despised and lowly, and not raise their heads in Israel." If they resist, he says, "not a soul must be left among them" - in other words, kill them all. How many of those who sat and listened to these horrible things - learned men and women, Torah scholars and community leaders - agreed with him? It's impossible to know.
The polling may suggest upon the public a religious connection to the act of genocide, but so have influential Israeli ministers.
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Americans are generally concerned that drone strikes could inadvertently harm civilians. In the polling I posted in a comment above, WWII soldiers who fought the Nazis largely didn’t hate them, despite many of the soldiers polled losing half their company or more. Americans have been greatly concerned about civilian casualties since Vietnam.
A population-wide survey, statements from national politicians, and some members of the judiciary have advocated for genocide according to mainstream definitions. The population-wide survey I posted in my OP shows that many Israelis desire genocide even in the most extreme conceptualization of killing every Gazan. Israel’s inability to carry this out because of near-unanimous disapproval does not indicate a lack of genocidal or intent, only a basic level of foresight in securing self-interest. Does this clarify things?
whereas they could be true about Israel if you squinted hard enough and ignored the people doing the saying.
It’s literally posted in my OP, but for other claims I’m happy to provide a source; you can look at the testimony of British doctors, or watch the recently published video of a team of medical workers being killed. The judiciary and public opinion are literally quoted in my OP, so I don’t know why squinting would be required unless these facts are seen as so brightly illuminating that they burn your eyes. From a leading Israeli politician and minister,
https://www.newsweek.com/worst-man-israel-makes-moral-argument-genocide-opinion-1936211
Smotrich's exact words: "Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."
Do you want more examples?
I’m arguing against the notion that “Israel doesn’t want to kill all Gazans because they haven’t done that”. They appear to be doing what they can to accomplish this goal within the constraints placed on them externally. The reason that I think they show disregard for human life is because various international bodies, doctors on the ground, and the little available videographic evidence on the ground supports this. The reason I think they are genocidal is because the statements of their politicians suggest this. The Israel apologist is forced to deny the legitimacy of the statements which the politicians (and public) have made indicating their genocidal intent. But the apologies can’t argue, “if they wanted to they would”, because they risk becoming an actual pariah state if they did so, and may even see the deportation of Israelis abroad etc.
If Israel were to do everything they could to kill as many Gazans as possible without losing what remains of international support, what would they do differently than what they are currently doing? They know they can’t actually bomb everyone immediately, all at once. But they can bomb as many as they can get away with, keeping everyone in semi-starvation, causing maximum trauma, destroying every dwelling, and so on. They can kill them all slowly in this way, to reduce international outrage.
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No, they have America and European powers protecting them from many of the projectiles while also feeding intel on Iran
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