coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
I must have confused the details of a conversation re: Ireland.
Jew-hatred
This is an ad hominem attack, and a confused one. It’s not clear what you intend by Jewish. Are you counting Neturei Karta? The Samaritans and Karaites? Ezra Koenig? Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal? If you mean “a system of beliefs and behavioral demands”, then there is nothing wrong with liking or disliking it based on its merits. I imagine you strongly dislike Salafism and Khameneism, or there is some ideology which you hate out of an impartial consideration. Do you mean the system of codified rulings considered normative among Rabbinical Judaism as practiced today? I think you got upset when I made a post a while back which specifically analyzed the moral code as taught among Orthodox Judaism.
even under what passes for "international law," that land basically belongs to whoever can hold it
This is not how the international community has ruled when they have come together at the UN. It seems you’re suggesting that international law is illegitimate. That’s unfortunate. Do you believe moral law is illegitimate? Why shouldn’t the international community come together to enjoin a minimum of rights and obligations?
it's not directly analogous to England and Ireland
How so?
Palestinians have always had a national identity (they have not)
When you’re living around everyone with a similar identity, there is no reason to distinguish (say) “Palestinian” from those living in the border regions of Lebanon. The Irish did not have a national identity until the 1800s.
Jews […] there for centuries
Yes, the Sephardic Jews lived peacefully in Palestine for a long time. They were 2.5% of Palestine in 1800! Surely this doesn’t mean they deserve to inherit the whole thing though, right?
coffee_enjoyer
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13hr ago
No one is forcing Israel to occupy and encroach on land in the West Bank. If they don’t want to add the residents to their nation, then they can just stop occupying and dispossessing them.
I believe in the past you have claimed to be Irish. I might be misremembering. One way to gauge your moral intuition on this conflict is to imagine a scenario where the British decided to occupy Ireland tomorrow, dispossess them, ban them from traveling throughout the UK, steal their homes, and then fund chavs to settle in Irish towns, chavs who routinely harass them. Occasionally chavs will burn down an Irish home or kill random Irish civilians. The British in the UK press call anyone who opposes this a Anglophobic Brit-hater.
Or another scenario to imagine: “what if Iran took control of Israel?” You can imagine Persians confining 3 million Israelis to an occupied zone where they are periodically brutalized and dehumanized. How would you reply to this? Do you think the international Jewish community would accept this as “just part and parcel of living in a civilized world” or something?
It’s very easy to call things that challenge us “hatred”. It’s harder to put ourselves in the shoes souls of the oppressed. If it were so easy to practice compassion for our enemies then we wouldn’t need a whole religion to compel humans to do it. As an Irishman I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
coffee_enjoyer
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14hr ago
What do you think about AI being employed as tool for propaganda in the Iran War on either side? Will we see widespread use? Has it already been used in the Ukraine War or is this its first appearance?
coffee_enjoyer
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14hr ago
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-plan-israeli-palestinian-conflict-vote-1887056
In the statement, Amir-Abdollahian said the first such occasion to be held since the war in the Gaza Strip began "provides an opportunity for thinking [of] a viable, responsible and real solution" to the conflict and its underlying causes. “Emphasizing the natural and inherent right of the Palestinian nation to legitimately resist oppression and occupation," the minister said, "the Islamic Republic of Iran has responsibly presented a democratic initiative for the Palestinian issue which has been registered in the United Nations. "Iran believes that the oldest and most painful crisis of the present century in the region and the world can be resolved through a referendum, with the help of the United Nations among the original inhabitants of Palestine, including Christians, Muslims and Jews," he added.
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Iran is not the Middle East, Iran is Iran
Poland is Poland, not Europe or Ukraine, and America is America, not Europe or Ukraine, but they’re both funding Ukraine to defend against Russian aggression in Europe. Surely if Iran lacks the right to fund defensive groups against Israeli encroachment, then Israel lacks the right to encroach on land for around 80 years. The majority of UN member states consider the Golan to be Syrian and demand it to be returned, but Israel occupies it with American approval. Isn’t it strange that Iran, the supposed “international pariah”, is not encroaching on any new land, not once in the past fifty years?
a literal
spookydoomsday clock
Their official stated policy goal is to leave the fate of Israel up to a democratic referendum which includes displaced Palestinians. Oh the horrors of justice and the rule of law! Is our heart so small and our palate so delicate that we should ignore three million Palestinians in the West Bank living in a dehumanizing and disenfranchised state as Israel’s state-sponsored proxy settlers (some labeled terrorist groups in the US) torture and torment Palestinian women and children nearly every month? I hope not. America should be unironic social justice warriors (not the gay kind).
Iran has been waging a proxy war
Israel has been waging a proxy war upon much of the Middle East through her greatest proxy America. I hope I don’t need to list all of the atrocities and damage caused by this proxy in the region. We are literally their proxy. We do their bidding because their supporters pay us to. You can pick up a copy of the Israel Lobby and read about it. If it weren’t for Israeli lobbyists it is unlikely that Iraq and Afghanistan would happen, and we likely would not have taken out Assad (half a million dead), and so on.
Other proxies include the South Lebanon Army which caused the Sabra and Shatila massacre. You can read how “prior to the massacre, the IDF took [their proxies] to training camps in Israel and showed them documentaries about the Holocaust. The Israelis told the Lebanese fighters that the same would happen to them too, as a minority in Lebanon, if the fighters did not take action against the Palestinians”. And “as the massacre unfolded, the IDF received reports of atrocities being committed, but did not take any action to stop it. Instead, Israeli troops were stationed at the exits of the area to prevent the camp's residents from leaving and, at the request of the Lebanese Forces, shot flares to illuminate Sabra and Shatila through the night during the massacre.” Another group that Israel has funded is MEK which carried out assassinations in Iran.
It is completely reasonable for Iran to fund proxy forces against an expansionist power which has a history of oppressing their neighbors. You may have noticed that America has been doing the same thing, as we fund Ukraine because of the territorial ambitions of Russia. The difference is that any Ukrainian left in Russian territory will eventually be given full rights; the Israelis cleanse the land of every Muslim and Christian they can before acquiring it, and any remaining non-Jew is oppressed and cannot participate in Israeli democracy. Horrifying. Do you think Russia has the right to target American scientists sleeping in their homes with their children via ballistic missiles, because we funded a proxy group to defend against their expansionist ambitions?
coffee_enjoyer
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18hr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
It’s definitely a parallel to the current conflict, it’s just the drones and missiles make it no longer rational to take Kharg. It’s no longer the rational thing to do, so someone is telling him to do it. Even John Bolton (!) is skeptical of how prepared we are.
My pessimistic prediction is: small landing; American soldiers die by drones; American news reports rumors that Iran will release the drone videos (they would not because they’re not that retarded); together this propaganda promotes further action by Trump + public; somewhere along there is an Israeli false flag in America; greater ground troops; many Americans die and trillions wasted because of Israeli by 2030
coffee_enjoyer
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20hr ago
1988 Iran is not 2026 Iran. Drones + their ballistic program.
coffee_enjoyer
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20hr ago
search “go to war”, second result https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2024/former-president-trump-campaigns-with-tucker-carlson-in-glendale-arizona/651374
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
You were justifying the war with arguments that could apply against both Israel and Iran. This suggests that your justifications are meritless, because it is nonsensical to fight on behalf of country A against country B for reason C when both countries are doing C. Similarly you argued for war against B when IMO most Americans would support doing C if we were on the receiving end of A’s aggression. It is not possible to discuss the merits of the war without bringing up Israel, the major party to the war, on whose behalf we are currently waging war. I don’t know if you intended your post to be a general justification for American participation in the conflict but this is how it came off. “Why don't people understand this?” — I am a member of the group of people who do not understand it, explaining why it is not understood.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The Israeli strategy has long been to confine American discourse to a narrow passage of acceptable comparisons and permitted moral indignations, so I do not find this response surprising.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
what Iran is doing - shutting down the global economy
Iran can’t be blamed for defending themselves from an unjust attack by Israel. I would hope Americans would do the same if they were in Iran’s place; if they wouldn’t, I think they lack courage and a moral compass. If Israel decided to start targeting the homes of every American service member, and our only hope was to shut it down, then that’s what America should do. This is the proper response to an Israeli attempt at your national annihilation, something they have a track record of doing in the past 80 years.
launching missiles at and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure
Israel does this
They've always been interested in doing this in all likelihood
This applies to Israel
What happens if they get the bomb
Israel has the bomb. Every accusation is an admission when it comes to Israel. The Israelis, with a straight face, will tell you we should “help the Iranian people have their voices heard” while they keep three million Palestinians under a military occupation and prevent them from voting and moving freely in violation of international law.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Kushner is shaping Trump’s behavior as you would a child or a dog. “Command the Marines over, that will scare Iran into capitulation. What, they didn’t capitulate? They don’t respect you at all! Get the marines on the boat, that will make them surrender. It didn’t work? Then we have to launch one tiny landing, otherwise America appears weak. You know Kharg Island doesn’t even count as Iran...”
Even in Nordic cohorts, there are gains from religious participation in the forms of charitable giving and civic engagement. There is also a twin study showing that prosociality is increased by religiosity in a US sample. It stands to reason that even the Nords benefit from religion. I don’t think we should extrapolate “humanity doesn’t need religion” from “Nords do quite well without religion”, because we ought to be concerned with maximizing the Good, not being comparatively better than peers, and there may be some other factor that leads to Nords having a high floor of prosociality. Perhaps both Nords and Namibians benefit from prosocial rituals, but starting from a different floor of behavior. (In the same way that the East Asian appears to have a low ceiling of violent criminality, while there is still likely some intervention that would either decrease or increase the rate).
Larson and Witham's survey of National Academy of Sciences members found roughly 92% rejected belief in God or a higher power
It makes sense that the cohort who is hyper-selected for rational ability would have some reduction or deficiency in other kinds of social-cognitive processing. I imagine if you surveyed the best artists and musicians, you’d find that they make fewer rational decisions than their STEM peers. Would these scientists cease being rational about science if the state enforced religious belief? Probably not. If these scientists believed that they would be judged by how truthfully they relay findings, would they produce more trustworthy data? Probably. Should we change the fabric of society because of research scientists, who compose like 0.001% of all citizens? Probably not. Consider that there have been losses to the mathematical community due to antisocial behavior, like what caused Grigori Perelman to flee academia from a sense of injustice. This affects the very best at the very top of cutting-edge science.
It really is possible that religious social technology which reduces scientific fraud is the new frontier of science. We have National Academy of Science members causing billions of dollars in lost progress through fraud. The National Academy of Science itself believes that fraud is a serious issue that is increasingly rampant in the field.
Any sufficiently coercive ideology with strong ingroup enforcement produces cooperative, rule-following, trust-generating behavior. That's a point in favor of strong social institutions generally, not religion specifically.
We already have all this external stuff! The peer review process and academic accreditation system have “coercive ideology” and “ingroup enforcement” and “strong social institutions”. The problem is that it’s easy to fake through all this, and there is no supernatural motive to care about honesty. What’s missing is the internal stuff. Western religion does not really do in-group enforcement but is predicated on introducing intrinsic commitments to behavioral proscriptions. The reason you don’t fabricate results isn’t because you’ll get caught (this will only lead to more subtle fabrications), but because behaving honestly is supernaturally pleasant and honorable and supernaturally socially-reinforced through a supernatural peer, while dishonesty is detested as being cataclysmic. “My university mentor would be ashamed if he found out I committed fraud” is much weaker than “my universal mentor who perceives the most subtle movement of my heart as if it were an entire solar system is counting on me to be absurdly trustworthy”. It is really easy to get people to believe the second, if just requires forgetting rationality in favor of a God Delusion.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I haven’t noticed any treatment or social movement develop which shows the ability to mitigate social stress and drug use while reducing the risk of early life adversity like religion. And these are the big cofactors for psychosis. So the science-y things which increase wellbeing probably won’t help the demoniac as well as as Jesus.
Science, technology and empiricism also make our lives better without having to believe in false propositions
But there are religious people at the forefront of science and technology. If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality. You also need to maximize for (1) social cooperation and trust, (2) honesty, (3) general prosperity, and (4) status-free interest. Atheism is hamful here. Religion is helpful. You want to know that the research you’re reading isn’t wholecloth invented by some status-obsessed person who does not engage in any prosocial ritual. This is necessary for science to progress. Perhaps someone can use AI to check the religious practices of the worst “science defectors” in recent memory; perhaps I am wrong. But religion uniquely reinforces intrinsically honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief. (Other rituals can plausibly do this, like Maoism, but they do not currently exist). And a fictive belief will always be stronger and recruit more of a person’s interest and commitment than an empirical belief.
I would rather be sane and sad than happy in delusion
But you win no extra points for doing so; all mortal flesh will be turned to dust and forgotten forever.
The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer
It is very beneficial for an atheist to be surrounded by theists who are +1 in the trustworthy, cooperative, industrious, selfless, and rule-following skill tree. In this sense, the atheist is a free-rider, because only the theist is sacrificing some % of his self-concern on the altar of civic beneficence. The atheist gets to self-benefit-maxx while making fun of the silly theist, but he doesn’t thank the theist when the cashier is particularly polite, or when the nurse shows more love when you’re hurt, or when you didn’t get into a car accident by a high driver. The Invisible God brings myriad invisible benefits to those with eyes to see them.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
If the Christian delusion increases social cooperation and buffers against social stressors, then it decreases the sum total delusion in a civilization and protects against those delusions which are acutely harmful to individual and collective wellbeing. A Noble Lie Delusion, if you will, necessary for any society that is serious about ameliorating suffering, which is the ultimate aim of the medical profession and possibly humanity itself (anything else is just collecting useless information, and there are now video games for that). Maybe one day, in a more enlightened era, doctors will prescribe medicinal midnight masses and meditations on the Love of God to treat the world-weary.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Was exploring Georgian Orthodox music recently.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Well wait, who do we thank for saving Iraq from ISIS? You can’t tank America, because we accidentally created ISIS when we purged the Baathists from all governmental roles; they regrouped under ISIS and comprised most of their leadership. We were on the verge of turning Iraq into a literal super villian tier country through our own retardation, and it was Iran-backed Shia rebels that were instrumental in their defeat on the ground, with American strikes in the air. I wonder if Americans even know that the second biggest terrorist attack in history was against Iran-linked Shias fighting ISIS, essentially their 9/11.
So, unironically, it was “Iran” that changed Iraq for the better, whereas our ineptitude almost turned them into a comically evil nation you’d only see in sepia-filtered TV war movies. You can read how stupid and callous our intervention was in the Paul Bremer emails released the other day.
Israel has not presented one name of a rape victim. None of the hostages that Hamas kept for years have alleged rape (correcting myself: a few accusations from hostages). None of the women who had Hamas members enter their homes and who interacted with them have alleged rape. When an Israeli journalist called every hotline and every hospital to determine whether rapes happened, not only did no one claim to have met a victim, but no one knew anyone who met a victim.
Israelis, in contrast, mass rape Palestinian prisoners. There are actual people coming forward, with documented injuries. The Israeli army’s top lawyer had to leak video evidence of a rape because the Israelis refused to prosecute the Israeli rapists, and for this act she was fired. When they tried to prosecute the Israeli rapists, popular politicians instigated a riot on the prison where the Israeli rapist was kept. The Israelis dropped all the charges against the Israeli rapists just a few hours ago, actually, this despite there being video evidence.
It is insane to me that we are allied with this country.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
There is not evidence of rape, though there is evidence that Israelis rape Palestinian prisoners; negotiations had not broken down according to the Omani mediator; Iran was never hostile to us; the school was no closer to the military target than the soldiers were close to the festival-goers
evil regimes that want to kill us
I do believe there is an evil regime trying to get Americans killed, trying to kill civilians, and trying to make the world less safe. IMO that regime is the Israeli regime. They want us dying like we did in Iraq for them.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Why would it be bad to launch a sneak attack on soldiers at a festival? Remember, you can’t say “because of the civilians present”, because apparently we don’t care about civilians in war. Neither can we use the “fog of war” excuse, because it was our first enty into the war with a target of our choice. And neither can we say “in times of peace”, because we were negotiating with Iran in peace, and were not at war. My point here, of course, is to draw a comparison between the 150 or so we killed (does not deserve empathy?), and whatever happened on October 7th (somehow deserves empathy?).
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
There were soldiers throughout the music festival, off-duty Israelis carrying rifles. Why should I care if they miss some soldiers and shoot some civilians? Is that worse than missing a base and hitting a school? Why should an American trust what Israel says about the allegation of rape when (1) they are maximally motivated to exaggerate the event and (2) they have never admitted to killing hundreds of their own civilians in cars with the Hannibal Directive? This is not a trustworthy country.
Are you aware that we don’t have a single name of someone coming forward to allege rape? And that similarly, female hostages have not alleged rape despite being kept among Hamas for years? Or that Israelis rape their Palestinian prisoners?
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Those now shrugging their shoulders at civilian casualties likely did not do the same when Hamas killed some civilians on October 7th. I do wonder how much selective empathy is going on.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Iran’s official policy wrt Israel is that the people who lived in the land before the 1948 ethnic cleansing / terror campaign should decide its future through a democratic referendum, whether they are Jewish or Muslim or Christian. In essence, they want to “bring democracy to the Middle East”, and “not let the terrorists win”, because the Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank do not currently have the right to vote, despite having their sovereignty impeded by Israel, and because they were expelled through genuine terrorism, which enabled the terrorists to “win” Israel.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
In previous conflicts they were not able to reign missiles down on Tel Aviv. Also we had other crazy sand people dying for us. Neither Americans nor Israelis are able to sustain consistently high sand people mortality figures. The key questions of this war IMO are (1) can we actually find all the ballistic missiles and (2) how easy is it to make a TEL. I haven’t found any expert even hazarding a guess on these except to say that making a TEL is pretty trivial stuff.
They're meeting in person, for God's sake
I don’t think anyone has a clear idea what is happening. But we have not announced any new leaders being killed after the “trick your opponent into coming to the negotiation table and then slaughter their family” strategy, right?
“You are hateful and motivated by hate” is the same old anti-Western argument that has been weaponized against Americans for 60 years now. It’s a stale, tired, and debunked anti-Christian canard. It’s been used by Marxists, Soviets, the racially-aggrieved, you name it. In recent years it has been rehashed by the pro-Israel mouthpieces who whisper in Trump’s ear. It is a laser-guided munition aimed directly at the Western Christian soul and its beautiful guilt-prone culture. And we are over it. No one buys it anymore. The guilt-tripwire has been illuminated and darkness will not overpower the Light.
As there is evidently nothing useful I can say to someone insistent on reading everything through the lens of pure hatred, I will only point you to the words of someone more Jewish than you, who has more experience in Israel. Feel free to call him an antisemite. This is from Moshe Ya'alon, the Minister of Defense in the 33rd and 34th Governments of Israel, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs in the 32nd Government, and the 17th Chief of the General Staff of the IDF:
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