anti_dan
13hr ago
They have not been doing those things as evidenced by the millions of living humans in the Gaza strip
anti_dan
16hr ago
Full blockade of all supplies. Bombing of any building with credible intelligence that a fighter or weaponry is in. Creeping artillery barrages of the entire territory. Things like that
anti_dan
19hr ago
The reason it looks aimless is because we are preventing them from taking effective measures though. You're presenting a catch-22
anti_dan
1d ago
Afghanistan is instructive only in the fact that it shows that weak occupations will not be successful. If you are arguing using Afghanistan as an example, the only logical argument is that Israel should be more brutal, allow in less aid, bomb every building they have credible intelligence houses a Hamas agent, etc, etc. In short, if you are referencing the failure of Afghanistan, the most logical argument vis-a-vis Israel becomes that the US should authorize total war, a blockade of all supplies, and a creeping artillery barrage until nothing is left.
If that is not what you think is a good idea, perhaps use some other example.
anti_dan
1d ago
So basically conflating events happening in 2 completely separate countries at this point.
anti_dan
1d ago
Why are Gaza and West Bank non-viable? I am quite confident that if Gaza was repopulated with a bunch North Dakotans and West Bank with a bunch of South Dakotans both would quickly become prosperous countries.
Also, I am consistently confused by the "2 state solution" rhetoric (depicted in you post with the phrase "keeping them split"). The "Palestinian" territories are non-contiguous and have been for almost a century now. There is no good reason for them to be a united state! That stupid idea proved a failure with Pakistan and Burma and would be stupid in the current situation as well. When you talk about a 2 state, instead of 3 state, solution you make yourself seem unserious IMO.
anti_dan
1d ago
What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.
Who would do such a thing? Would it even be effective? India, after all, is still a neigh-ungovernable amalgamation of warring peoples. The US just got done trying something like that in Afghanistan and Iraq, to miserable failure. In my opinion your hypothetical Raj would have to be significantly MORE brutal on the population than the current military operations conducted by Israel are to have any hope at success.
anti_dan
1d ago
Starving babies is incidental to the overall strategy. There is no way to starve Hamas without starving babies (that we have found) because Hamas rules the territory, thus Hamas always eats first, and second, and third, then maybe a few babies get some morsels.
With something this complicated it is incumbent on critics to offer at least the skeleton of an alternative proposal so that it can be critiqued. Just saying something is bad is woefully inadequate. Do you think Israel hasn't had a meeting where someone brought up the point that starving children is not good optics (at the very least, if not also brought up the morality of it)? Of course not. They've had hundreds of such meetings. Notably the people who were giving aid to Gaza before didn't really even try to ask the question of "how do we get food to civilians without paying and feeding Hamas?" They just were like "here Hamas here is a buffet and some rocket assembly materials."
anti_dan
2d ago
Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron.
Do you think we live in such a world? I am American and can assure you we do not. We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war. Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip and the annexation of all the land towards the Jordan would have begun. And it would have been done with fewer Israeli casualties than the current war, and it would probably have been over 3 decades ago.
Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped.
Yes indeed, as a result of "humanitarian" causes the US and Europe impose on Israel.
If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border
The post 10-7 war can hardly be described as intense combat. Kid gloves at best.
the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine.
Lack of punctuation aside, this is just incorrect. All that antisemitism already existed. I knew about it on 10-6, we saw it on 10-7 before they launched a single counter-attack.
anti_dan
2d ago
That doesn't look like it to me, so why would it be the default assumption?
What it looks like to me is Israel is fighting with two hands tied behind its back. What they, IMO correctly, perceive is that most of "the international community" doesn't want them to win, nor would it tolerate them using META strategies in furtherance of an Israeli victory. So what they end up doing, and we end up observing, is a bunch of tiny motions in the direction of victory that advance the goals of Israel a little bit at a time, while mostly carefully avoiding any dramatic moves in that direction, which would have a high likelihood of generating massive blow-back, even if there was no alternative plausible avenue to generating whatever that strategic gain is/was.
anti_dan
4d ago
Google glass was tried like a decade ago. This is just that, incognito, with less features, right?
To me it seems kinda lame, and POV video sucks.
anti_dan
4d ago
The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.
I worked in medical device development early in my career. Its not that these are not very impressive technological innovations, it is that people were perfectly capable of living to their 80s in 1776, and the reasons so few did had largely been addressed by the 50s. Lots of development has been in surguries. I'd much rather have surgery now than in 1955.
Ill freely admit I am a bit biased, my work was in life saving pediatric implants, which is not nearly the size of the "relieve grandpa joe's pain a little bit" part of the industry.
anti_dan
5d ago
But they bear no resemblance to the thing the commune person is thinking about. Modern seamstresses are either high end bespoke precision craftsmen making suits and/or dresses for multimillionaires and politicians, or for the majority, factory workers outputting thousands of articles a day. Neither is stress free at all, if you mess up slightly at the bespoke place the client and your boss chew you out, and you might get eventually fired. If you are slow or mess up at the factory you get docked pay and eventually fired.
The difference between the commune fantasy and many others is other types of fantasy jobs do have significant intermediate level positions. I can want to be on the Supreme Court, but then I only score 165 on the LSAT, I can work a solid career and eventually become a local judge. Or maybe I'm not even that level, I can still become some hack PI/Family Law/DUI defense attorney. Many types of aspirational jobs are like this. Sports is a well known tournament profession, but my friend has ground out a solid living as a tennis instructor after his college stint in D2.
anti_dan
5d ago
Basically everything that actually gives us longevity now was invented by 1950. Clean water, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines. There have been some significant developments in childbirth, but obviously that part alone is not the cost driver. It is end of life care, subsidies to hypochondriacs and the poor, and maintenance treatments like lifelong blood pressure meds and dialysis.
anti_dan
5d ago
Still, one only need to go to a criminal courtroom to observe that tattoos on females are indicative of criminality. A while back I was in court and a woman had been arrested on a fairly old warrant. It wasn't violence per se, but she made a stupid video of herself shooting a gun into the air. The kicker is it had one of those cheap auto-switch adjustments so it is technically an automatic per statute. She was, of course, 4 months pregnant and engaged. But she also had tattoos, the same ones from the video. So what do you do with a 22 year old who is clearly more mature than the 19 year old who was a reckless idiot, and also eligible for a very long prison sentence.
anti_dan
6d ago
Who would spin up this? Israel's current western opponents certainly would not unless it was the US that attacked Israel.
anti_dan
6d ago
Not at all. If the international community was neutral, all the Gazans would die of their own inability to produce any food or trade of value. They only exist as an entity because of large influxes of foreign aid.
anti_dan
6d ago
Genocide and/or Ethnic Cleansing of Israelis has widespread supermajority public support among Palestinians. So does does destroying America. The extrapolations from such things are not hard.
anti_dan
6d ago
They could, however, be called "Egyptians" with no major disruption to that polity, which many of them, or their ancestors, once were. The reason this doesn't happen is because having rump "Palestinians" as a grievance group is an intentional tactic.
anti_dan
6d ago
It seems to be every international org, and every unbiased org, any unaffiliated with Israel, that have been testifying the same thing. Why would Swedes or Japanese or American Baptists all be lying? The UN, in the link at #3, is saying that their own staff face hunger and “hospitals have admitted people in a state of severe exhaustion caused by a lack of food.”
Israel has always been disliked by basically everyone because "Jews" aside from American conservatives who either A) Recognized Islam as a greater threat; or B) Were religious fellas hoping for a restoration of the holy land, eventually. Or maybe the rapture.
There are very few actual option in this situation. Gazans, by a vast majority, want a genocide of Israel. Israeli's are a split bunch, some want genocide of Gaza, some want peace, and some want to genocide themselves. The people who want peace cant get it. So long as no magical entity comes and brainwashes the Gazans into thinking Jews are cool and good neighbors (see, for example, the fictional jutsu kotoamtsukami it will continue to be. We then are left with two permanent solutions, being genocide of either side. Lay down your chips, which would you prefer?
anti_dan
8d ago
Probably the morally correct number. But what is the militarily correct number? That is, the number that Israelis should expect to be alive after a successful campaign in which a functional, strongly anti-terrorism regime rules that territory.
I suspect the number approaches zero.
The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
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