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Rape denialism is inexcusable coming from anyone, but particularly hypocritical coming from individuals whose catchphrase was "believe women" for the better part of a decade.
And my point would be that it's not particularly hypocritical when those individuals are just playing the same game everyone else is. Including Israel, that is not really concerned with whatever amount of dead or raped Palestinians they leave in their wake. I mean, I don't think the worst part of that is the hypocrisy but whatever.
I, for one, do not assign zero moral value to members of my outgroup. While I accept that the average Israeli is probably more likely to take seriously accusations of rape made against Palestinians than accusations made against Israelis – I do nonetheless believe that the modal Israeli assigns greater moral value to members of his outgroup than the modal Palestinian does. Call me a Zionist shill if you must, that's what I believe.
According to one n>2000 poll, if you're willing to equate judgments of the other side's "humanity" with judgments of their moral worth, the modal Israeli and Palestinian assign each other equal moral worth, namely 0/100:
Jewish Israelis are apparently slightly less inclined to dehumanize Palestinians than vice versa, but it's risible to suggest that the average (let alone the modal) Israeli is deeply moved by high-minded European notions about the intrinsic value of human life in their attitude towards Palestinians.
I'm going to have to plead "revealed preferences".
Insofar as I can tell, the revealed preferences match the preferences stated in this study.
Well, that just seems preposterous. Hamas's strategy of employing Gazan civilians as human shields by stashing combatants and armaments in civilian facilities (hospitals, schools, mosques etc.) is well-established. The only reason they employ this strategy is because they know that the IDF (and the broader Israeli population, by extension) assigns a value to the lives of Gazan civilians which is greater than zero, and would prefer not to kill them if possible.
Fine, fine, you'll say the IDF doesn't really care about Gazan civilians' lives, but know that it would be bad optics in the eyes of the international community to kill them willy-nilly. But assigning a greater-than-zero value to the lives of Gazan civilians for reasons of pragmatism and realpolitik (as opposed to "high-minded European notions about the intrinsic value of human life") is still assigning them a greater-than-zero value. It's telling that this is an asymmetric strategy: no Hamas leader or foot-soldier is going to hesitate before attacking an Israeli military installation out of concern for civilian collateral damage.
Yes, that seems obvious. The survey link I posted wasn't cherrypicked. I knew in advance what it would say contingent on it existing, because the Israeli/Zionist public, and even more so the IDF, barely attempt to conceal that their endogenous concern for the wellbeing of Palestinians runs neutral to negative. Where attempts at plausible deniability are made, the "plausible" part often seems to be defined against some platonically credulous interlocutor.
You make a clear demonstration of this, with your pre-emptive retreat to:
even though we were explicitly talking about moral value, if you recall two replies back:
This came in the middle of your grandstanding about how Israeli Zionists, unlike opportunistic woke "rape denialists", are not just "playing the game"; that they sympathize with the plight of Palestinians more authentically than feminists sympathize with women. That's already absurd -- you don't need to set woke humanity at greater than 0 to see it -- but to the point, it's a non-sequitur to fall back to "being pressured into acting as if we care counts as caring", just as it is to switch your foil from feminists to Hamas.
You are being deliberately slippery here, like elsewhere in the thread where you doubled down on your claim that there is video evidence of gang rape by adducing a source that there is video and there is evidence of gang rape, and then insisted that the person who called out your fabrication was being unreasonable and worse. You should be banned for that.
Preferences can only be revealed insofar as there are no external constraints.
It tells you that Israel has greater incentives and/or ability to delay gratification. What's your point?
I will reiterate that there is a difference between duped by a claim made by others and inventing a claim from whole cloth. You don't have to believe the claim that Hamas livestreamed themselves committing assorted acts of sexual violence, but this claim did not originate with me and I'm sick of you people pretending that it did. The person accusing me of making up this claim from whole cloth was being unreasonable by so doing. I have already pre-committed to eating my words if this claim turns out to be false, which is more than can be said for any of the people in this thread accusing me of lying through my teeth.
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