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I hope that this comment doesn't get me banned, because I'd like to talk about a very inflammatory subject, and no matter how impartially you discuss it people tend to get angry about stuff like this. I'm hoping that the culture war thread in the Motte is a place where we can talk about such difficult subjects from a purely intellectual strategic perspective without getting emotional.
I think one of the major failures of our democracy is that it easily allows foreign intelligence agencies to easily game the system. For example, it's obvious to anybody who examines the evidence that Epstein was a Mossad asset. Not only was Ghislaine Maxwell's dad Mossad, but on top of that all of Epstein's money came to him in suspicious ways. Supposedly he was a wealthy financier, but I'm currently trying to start a hedge fund myself and I can tell you all of these investment companies leave a long paper trail. If you have more than ten investors in a single state, you need to register with the Fed. And at the scale of money that Epstein had, he would need to register with the Fed anyway regardless of the De Minimus exemption.
Another example is George Soros. His influence on politics is undeniable, and he actively sabotages Western nations for profit. Unlike Epstein, it's much harder to prove that Soros works directly for Israel, but the web of influence he has spun is undeniable.
Here's where the controversial part comes in: I think the only actionable solution to this problem is to nuke Israel in a way that is plausibly deniable. Obviously we couldn't do this openly, since Israel undoubtedly has nukes hidden in some American cities in case Mossad blackmail ever fails disastrously (which is currently happening thanks to the preponderance of DeepFakes making all blackmail material irrelevant). I believe that Netanyahu had referred to this failsafe in the past as "the Samson doctrine" (which is very poetic, I have to admit). This is why the nukes would need to be deniable. Some of Russia's old cold-war era suitcase nukes would do the trick. Maybe one planted in Jerusalem, and another in Tel Aviv. Is this an atrocity? Sure. But I would argue that by supporting a government which allows its intelligence agency to use pedophile rings like Epstein to blackmail their "closest ally," the Israeli people are themselves committing an atrocity, and they should be held responsible for the actions of their government, which they themselves elected. Just like the German people elected Hitler - and paid a price for it - the Israeli people elected Netanyahu, and so they should be held accountable for any crimes his government commits. It's pure game theory, that's all. If you don't punish tribes that cross ethical lines like this, their behavior will replicate, whereas if you punish them with extreme prejudice, other nations will learn that this kind of behavior is absolutely not tolerated. (I don't want to get into the subject of Gaza - that's WAY too controversial a topic to even touch. I am purely talking about the crimes the Mossad committed by using Epstein as an intelligence asset, which I feel is easily provable and fairly defensible.)
Anyway, despite their low yield (probably a mile in diameter) the suitcase nukes will work because they don't need to blow up the whole city, they just need to cause enough infrastructure damage to cripple Israel, and the secondary blast radius will force most of these cities to be evacuated and unusable. At that point, the surrounding Muslim countries (most of which are hostile to Israel) will sweep in and finish the job. Even if their governments hold back, the armed extremist groups who hate the Jews will definitely act. Then the remainder of the Epstein files can be leaked, revealing Mossad involvement. While Israel is crippled, the general public population of their "greatest ally" will be calling for revenge against them.
Netanyahu is unlikely to activate the Samson doctrine because he will need American support to deal with the exodus of Jewish refugees fleeing the now shattered nation. If he activated the Samson doctrine, then every Jewish person outside Israel's borders would undoubtedly be seen as a potential Israeli agent, and in that kind of environment, what started as the destruction of Israel would undoubtedly end up as the extermination of the entire Jewish race. After all, what government would tolerate the existence of a Fifth Column religious group that smuggled nukes into their own cities at the behest of a hostile foreign power? Anyway, Game Theory suggests that even if Israel IS stupid enough to activate the Samson doctrine, it's worth taking the hit in order to eradicate them and teach all other countries that sponsorship of Epstein-style assets is a red line that they absolutely should not cross. If we lose L.A. or D.C., frankly I don't think that would be such a great loss from a societal perspective. Obviously it would be a tragedy in terms of the lives lost, but in terms of the "Greater Good" I think it's affordable.
However, for such a plan to work, we need a good smokescreen, so that our nukes have plausible deniability. This means that Israel needs to be at war, big time. If Iran gets nuked, it's highly likely that any suitcase nukes that hit Israel would be attributed to extremist groups in the Middle East doing a revenge bombing. This is why I supported the U.S. getting involved in the war with Iran on behalf of Israel. It's not because I'm a fan of Israel, it's just that the more the situation in the Middle East escalates the more likely it is that any suitcase nukes that hit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will be attributed to Muslim extremists rather than us.
Anyway, that's my Ted Talk. I'm curious about what the rest of you think. I'm not interested in debating the morality of this, just the logistics. If this is too controversial a topic even for the Culture War roundup, please let me know and I'm happy to delete this comment.
Comparing this comment to comments where people nonchalantly float either ethnically cleansing or genociding Palestinians or intentionally starving babies as part of the war effort, why would this deserve a warning at all? The standard for engagement with the subject is that clamoring for genocide is fine. But doing so in detail is not fine because...?
You can read the answer in my actual warning, but the short version is that you are focused on the wrong thing. Telling on oneself by expressing a clear preference for violent solutions is at least speaking plainly, and so long as it is otherwise rule-abiding it gives others an opportunity to respond plainly. "Just asking questions" with nary a link or effortful analysis, while simultaneously insisting on what "everyone" knows, is much more obviously a rules violation.
(Endorsing a group's extermination does arguably violate the "write like everyone is reading and you want them included in the conversation" rule, but that's a tough one because we also don't want to grant a heckler's veto to anyone who feels like disagreement or even sharp criticism of their in-group constitutes exclusionary rhetoric. Ultimately we have to make a lot of judgment calls on who the audience seems to actually be.)
So the primary offenses were consensus-building rhetoric and inflammatory claims without proportional evidence. Overall the post also looks like a troll to me, but Poe's Law applies, so it's best to just focus on the clearest problems. Furthermore, it's gone now but this four year old account initially posted a "test" post to the thread to verify that their post would be visible, suggesting that this is an alt from a repeat rule violator who understands that new accounts get filtered for a while. If I'd caught it a little sooner, I'd have removed and shadowbanned rather than moderating it; this kind of posting is essentially indistinguishable from spam (though spam is often written more intelligently than this).
I do not understand why someone would lurk a burner account in this space for literally years just for an occasional opportunity to vomit something like this into the environment; that degree of autistic grudge-nursing and discourse-poisoning would be downright shocking if it weren't for some reason the bog standard for foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semites. Which, you know, maybe this poster isn't an anti-Semite, but when their doubled-down response to moderation was "why are you bringing up anti-Semitism" even though I hadn't brought it up at all, well, methinks the lady doth protest too much.
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