fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
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User ID: 3415
fmac
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8hr ago
No?
In 2005 I wouldn't hold them responsible for Gazans starving, because they backed off
In 2025 I do, because they are very much controlling the inflow of goods and also levelling the area/generally wrecking lots of destruction
fmac
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8hr ago
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area"
I'd say we're basically there
fmac
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9hr ago
Yes exactly
Hence my opinion that the Israeli strategy is bad because it's inherently unsustainable and also profoundly not going to resolve anything.
fmac
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11hr ago
You're right
I struggle to call this a war though. It's insurgency whack a mole with a sprinkling of ethnic cleansing
fmac
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12hr ago
Sure
My knowledge of the Vietnam war is shaky at best. My point is that insurgencies can win just by surviving and running out the clock
fmac
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19hr ago
Your enemy giving up and leaving is winning. It's a shitty way to win because you have 0 initative, but you still get what you want in the end.
fmac
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19hr ago
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.
And the USA shit stomped them with an insane k/d ratio until they got bored and left. Dude's in cars with AKs are a nightmare but can't do much against a modern army.
How many people with AKs running around Boston would it take for the whole city to freak out and panic?
Not many, but I'm talking existential risk here, not "makes everything fucking awful for a week before dying"
fmac
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19hr ago
Agreed.
I predict both sides will refuse to understand this and the cycle of violence will perpetuate for our lifetimes
fmac
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19hr ago
No disagreement here. They could cause a lot of damage sure. Israel is crazy fragile.
But Israel has a lot of heavy gear. They'd win after a few days if they weren't worried about hostages (which in this scenario, they'd allow them to be collateral damage, I would)
fmac
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19hr ago
Totally
I don't blame the Israeli people for being mad. I just don't think disproportionate violence is okay, even if provoked
I understand why everyone feels how they do, but as the peanut gallery I'm pointing and judging
fmac
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19hr ago
I actually don't know a ton any them so I'd love to hear why?
Their air dominance over Iran was pretty gangster though. SEAD is not easy.
fmac
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19hr ago
The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up
That is winning. It's a shitty unglamorous way to win, but they accomplished their objectives, and America did not. The Americans could have stuck around and stamped them into oblivion with unlimited political will, but they didn't have it, so they left.
Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.
I agree but also don't. Money and political will aren't infinite, they'll have to pull back and scale down eventually. The only way this really ends-ends is genocide, and they can't do that, so they'll have to give up eventually.
fmac
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19hr ago
Yeah it's an absolute mess. At this point I honestly think both sides deserve each other. They've built an incredible human suffering machine and now they get to ask wallow in it.
I feel awful for the children though, they didn't choose this.
fmac
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1d ago
That's true
Less of a long painful history though.
Also both Germany and Japan had much better cultural scaffolding for bootstrapping back into friendly productive 20th century neighbors.
fmac
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1d ago
If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.
I think that 1) that is totally true and 2) this is profoundly unlikely given the long history of these two peoples and human nature to say "fuck you don't tell me what to do" with a side helping of Isreal being unable to keep its hands to itself re: settlements, etc
We shall see!
fmac
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1d ago
Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?
A combination of "with great power comes great responsibility" and "you break it you bought it".
They're not entitled by default, but given the amount of control Isreal likes to exert over the strip (and who can blame them), they are now de-facto responsible for the outcomes.
If Isreal decided "fuck it, Gaza's borders are open. We're just gonna sit behind the border wall and do our thing, the people of Gaza are free to do whatever" then yeah, I would assign them zero responsibility.
They don't like having rockets shot at them (fair), so they don't do this. But because they chose to do something, they get to inherit the consequences.
fmac
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1d ago
I feel like you're also approaching this from the assumption that the Canadian attack is an unprovoked sucker punch against an innocent America. In which, yeah, fuck them.
How would your feelings about this change if America was on its 20th(ish?) year of controlling Canada's borders, the country was absolutely destitute, and America kept pushing the border further into Ontario? Also I guess in this metaphor America is also pumping the water out of the great lakes as fast as they could, regardless of how many Canadians used it to drink.
Further continuing this absolutely tortured metaphor, how much responsibility do you assign to the roughly 50% of the population who if I remember correctly, is under the age of 20? These children were born into a world of shitty poverty, have absolutely no freedom to leave their shitty poverty city, and are profoundly aware that the reason they can't have nice things is the hostile mega-power that gets to decide things like "how much food and medicine they get on a monthly basis". They're propagandized too by Hamas sure, but the Isreali's don't exactly make Hamas propaganda job hard.
In some ways, Isreal has developed Gaza into one of the world's foremost Jihadist factories. I have a hard time imagining a setup that would radicalized young people born into it better than the current status quo.
fmac
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1d ago
"Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool.
So is "hey your baby/sister/mom/friend/polycule member starved to death in your arms, want to blow up the people we feel are responsible?"
fmac
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1d ago
The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory
I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory. Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.
I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.
Anyone making confident calls about any of the insurgencies I listed above partway through ended up very wrong.
fmac
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1d ago
Even without Hezbollah, it was very close to major disaster
This is such funny hand wringing. What major disaster? 1000 more Israeli's die (that would suck sure)?
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? Yeah they'd do more damage, it would take longer to root them out sure. But airplanes and tanks > ak's and pickups, it was always going to end like this.
"Omg Hamas almost overran Isreal" is straight melodramatic bullshit. Even if the whole gang pitched in Isreal would have won, it just would have been more like Yum Kippur and less like every other middle eastern insurgency wack-a-mole
fmac
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2d ago
This is a funny question, are you trying to figure out how many people are rural/in flyover states?
- 1km
- presumably within 2km
- ~40km and it's almost certainly corn
- Canadian so I'm going to use Via, 2km
- funnily enough, 4km, it's kind of annoying how far it is/how few Walmarts Toronto has
- 25km, depending on traffic this is infinity far away, thankfully there's a train to there
fmac
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3d ago
Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long
Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago
They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university
fmac
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3d ago
Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak
What is replacing them?
I don't think it's propaganda? I feel like genocide and ethnic cleansing are different ways of slicing the same flavor of activity by severity. I'd define ethnic cleansing as what I said above, and genocide as that + "with the intent to permanently eliminate the group".
Ethnic group: Palestinians
Religion: Muslims
Where are they getting moved: ping-ponging back and forth between the North and South of the strip, the Israeli's would be even happier to push them into Egypt, but they can't.
Israel has an easy time bc Israeli Jews don't live in Gaza, but if they did, they obviously wouldn't be getting shuffled around the strip. I don't think ethnic cleansing requires there to be unaffected people in the geography to contrast against the effected people.
I genuinely have no idea what's true at this point with this conflict but this is pretty on the nose, even for the Levant gang
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rp31lk7mzo
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