dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Your last paragraph is ridiculous on so many levels. Maybe least of which is that you think it’s possible to send the Temple Mount and Cave of the Patriarch anywhere.
I was actually asking a genuine question. Despite even being married to an ethnic Jew at some point, the fine details of what Jews consider sacred didn't make it to me. It's not very common knowledge in the US aside from maybe uhh the city of Jerusalem has some holy sites? Something about a wall? And a temple?
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
Of course the land is sacred to them.
/tableflip
Ok, so...
Isn't this the Israelis falling a bit below the sanity waterline? Yes it's true they're surrounded on all sides by people who are so toxic that they would rather die than coexist with Israelis, or even just share a border with them, and yes these other people are behaving really, really badly. But given that Israel is not allowed to solve this the old fashioned way (genocide), and all avenues for peace have epsilon probability of success, ... shouldn't they just nope out?
I agree it sets a terrible precedent that your neighbors can get their way just by succumbing to a deep and apparently permanent craze, and ideally you'd like to prevail against them, but at some point shouldn't you just move to a better neighborhood? Unlike the Palestinians, there are other nations of the world that would welcome them.
Israelis seem destined to be in this fight for centuries, and they're apparently okay with it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
That is kind of my question yes. Does the solution require a leader that’s sane and visionary enough to want peace and prosperity with cosmopolitan sensibilities while at the same time is capable of doing violence to his own people to avoid any violence coming to Israel and ruining the plan. And keeping this up for decades.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Of course, this isn't going to happen because Hamas is an apocalyptic death-cult comprised of guys who thought that the Muslim Brotherhood and PLA were booth "too chill" for their tastes, and due to some unfortunate quirks of Islamic political and moral theory no one else is really inclined to stand up to them.
Right. I’m asking how can a moderate leader succeed given the Hamas death cult. Is this hopeless?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
, absolutely forbid any violence towards Israel
Isn’t this the “miracle happens” part? Aren’t the extremists going to question whose side you’re truly on? Won’t you be marginalized or assassinated as more moderate Palestinian leaders have been?
assume last paragraph is a joke
Not actually. It may be less detached from reality than expecting Palestinians to stop doing violence to Israel over the next 100 years.
Suppose you were a moderate leader of the Palestinians. What on Earth could you possibly do to end the suffering and negotiate a lasting peace?
Palestinians appear to feel very strongly about unrestricted right of return. In the failed Camp David talks, Arafat demanded 150,000 Palestinians in the diaspora be allowed to settle Israel per year while Israel pushed back and said 100,000 total, though they offered a $30 billion fund to help Palestinians abroad to attain permanent settlement abroad.
This is pretty far apart. Israel doesn’t want to be demographically obliterated but Palestinians that fled Israel consider it their ancestral home.
How do you reconcile this? Wouldn’t any Palestinian leader that negotiated a peace deal without this be considered illegitimate and probably marked for death?
On the other hand, would the hostilities even end if Israel somehow agreed to unrestricted ROR? There’s so much bad blood that even this is hard to imagine as being the thing that achieves lasting peace.
I’m not sure any concession short of Israel packs up and leaves forever would end the violence.
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
Despite how ghastly the behavior of the underdog, people are eager to side with them because they believe that they are only the underdog because they are oppressed, and the oppressor is ultimately the one that's morally culpable for their behavior. If they were not oppressed, their natural state would be peaceful and humane.
This leads to a confabulation of sorts. The underdog is both given the benefit of the doubt about potential bad behavior and they are also absolved of responsibility when their behavior is undeniably bad.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Huh. The world's kind of scary when the US doesn't care about your conflict.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
FTA
Actually, less than a month ago as I write, in a “type 1 conflict” in which America had no dog, two hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed.
Sorry, what? Can I have a link? I can't even find a Wikipedia article.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.
With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I don't know about 3, but they apparently thought they were hot shit at 2. This is a moment of reckoning.
In my view, the maximally rational response to this would be
- significantly beef up wall security and air defense
- continue very surgical strikes into Gaza to kill Hamas and destroy military hardware
- find and use non-headline grabbing ways of depriving Gaza of resources
- otherwise go about life as normally as possible and not show any signs of being terrorized
So, +1 for not immediately invading.
That said, they're all clearly terrorized and look bitchmade. So, time to roll in and fill underground tunnels with fuel and burn Hamas to a crisp. Probably, as a matter of taste, it would be good to wait until the President of the US is safely out of the neighborhood.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Sorry, bunch there was not scaled properly. I meant "IDF will absolutely blow up hundreds of innocent civilians in a single strike by accident at some point"
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
My expectation is that IDF will absolutely blow a bunch of innocent civilians up by accident at some point, but this seems way too soon. Seems more plausible that some terrorists firing janky weapons at Israel accidentally shot themselves in the foot hospital.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Taking this seriously, has this ever worked?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather: they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
I basically go up to everyone condemning Israel and say "zap! you're now the PM of Israel. what's your next move?" and I generally get a range from "Israel should follow international law" (hand wave hand wave) with no specifics on how they protect their security and sovereignty doing that, all the way to something the Heath Ledger version of The Joker would say.
I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
You can't talk like this and then pretend you're the civilized party here! Though of course, looking at the so-called developed nations, especially America, maybe they don't talk like this, but they sure behave like it, so maybe there actually are no or few civilizations around.
I agree it sounds menacing but I parse that as: the strong don't get surprised by a devastating terrorist attack Hamas has been planning for 2 and a half years almost in the open and then get sucked basically irrecoverably into an invasion of Gaza that causes enormous collateral damage on both sides that will skyrocket animosity and anger for decades to come.
They obviously failed at this "strong" ideal here but IMO, part of security and stability means convincing criminals and terrorists that it's futile to even try to do bad things.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective
Ozempic is probably clearly an all cause mortality improvement for people with obesity, which is a huge win, though I think the cost-benefit is worse if you're taking it for non-health reasons since it does cause an apparent decrease in muscle mass and also elevated heart rate which... probably can't be good?
I think those are the catches.
I sure do hear a lot of muttering from naturally thin types about it though!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Even in the 70s the US was doing things in Vietnam that would be much more scandalous if it did today. There's been a lot of moral progress since the end of WW2 and I have trouble judging Israel's current population for things most of them had no hand in.
It sounds like your point boils down to: truly enlightened people would accept the sins of the past and surrender the place to the Palestinians and make a new life elsewhere. That sounds like a great standard but I don't think any people on Earth would rise to it.
(For a phantasmagoric twist, it would be nice if Palestinians were so touched by the offer that they offered to pack up instead and both sides had a eureka moment and moved towards a single state peace)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Good points, though, I suspect if Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Vietnam bordered us the American people would experience far more collateral damage and the US military would behave quite monstrously. Perhaps some degree of civility depends on circumstance and context, as you say.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
More concretely, my wager is they are asking civilians to clear out of North Gaza because they plan to occupy it and root out and destroy all of the tunnels and hopefully destroy supply caches and find hostages and treat everyone who gets in the way as Hamas. I expect they would leave when this mission is accomplished.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
No, I am not moved by appeals to ancient history. That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
Yes I suppose am rejecting religious devotion to a piece of land as a terminal value when there is abundance of land on Earth that’s far less problematic. I consider this sub-sane.
This is independent from why the homicidal opponents want it, IMO.
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