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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare

So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.

Step back first. The way courts typically evaluate laws that putatively infringe on a constitutional right was through an analysis called strict scrutiny. Basically, take any constitutional guarantee ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...") and add an "...unless it has a really good reason!" exception. This isn't an exaggeration. Courts were allowed to give the government a free pass on constitutional infringements provided the state's efforts were "narrowly tailored" and "necessary" to achieve a "compelling state interest".

But what counts as a compelling reason? Who decides which laws are narrowly tailored? It's judges, all the way down. For something like freedom of speech, there's a robust enough appreciation that you can expect a reasonable amount of skepticism among the judicial corps against efforts by the government to muzzle expression. In practice, strict scrutiny generally functioned as decently high threshold, unlike its contrasting rational basis test which practically was a free pass for the government to do whatever.

But what about topics a little more heated, like guns? Judges have been squishier and far more willing to accept the government's justifications that a given legal restrictions was "necessary". Hell, some judges even weaseled their way into ditching strict scrutiny in favor of the more permissible intermediate scrutiny. Judge VanDyke of the 9th Circuit lampooned this doormat reflex in his 2022 McDougall dissent (cleaned up):

Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn't expect anything less here. As I've recently explained, our circuit can uphold any and every gun regulation because our current Second Amendment framework is exceptionally malleable and essentially equates to rational basis review.

The cases VanDyke cited illustrate the problem well. The 9th Circuit has ruled it's ok to require people to demonstrate either "good cause" or "urgency or need" to the government before they're allowed to carry a gun outside their home. Set aside whatever negative sentiments you might have about guns, and instead imagine the reaction if similar restrictions were imposed on newspaper licenses. Imagine having to convince a cop that you have "good cause" to start a blog. Constitutional guarantees are worthless if they're predicated on a government agent agreeing that your reason for exercising them is good enough.

The practice of circuit judges shrugging off challenges to gun control laws with "I don't know man this seems totally reasonable to me" went on for several years, and I can only imagine it pissed off the pro-2A wing of the Supreme Court. Sure, Trump's appointments eventually meant they had the numbers on their side and so a very favorable 2A opinion was inevitable, but a stern rebuke of "We really mean it this time!" didn't seem like it was going to work in getting the circuit courts to stop fucking around.

So when they finally got their chance, SCOTUS tried a different approach. Instead of just triple-underlining and double-highlighting the words STRICT SCRUTINY, Clarence Thomas writes the majority opinion that created a brand new analysis wholly unique to the Second Amendment: gun control laws can only be constitutionally permissible if they're consistent with "historical tradition of firearm regulation." Any law being evaluated must therefore have a historical analogue, and the closer the analogue was to the year 1791 (when 2A was ratified), the better.

I was thrilled with Bruen's result, but puzzled by its reasoning because it seemed to just recreate the circumstances that led to the "fake strict scrutiny" problem. It turns out Bruen had way more of an effect than I anticipated. Clarence Thomas is a fascinating figure in many ways, in part because he's America's most powerful black conservative, who just happens to draw direct inspiration from the black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. I have no idea if this was intentional, but Thomas laid out a beautiful carpet of caltrops that the government couldn't help but step on over and over again.

What followed Bruen was a litigation maelstrom. Government attorneys across the land scoured dusty historical tomes, in search of whatever they could get their hands on and use as justification. The first problem they ran into was there just weren't that many laws on the books around the time of the Founding, let alone laws that specifically governed firearms. Generally speaking, Americans were free to strut about town with their muskets in tow, no questions asked. The lawyers had to cast a ever-wider net to snag anything relevant, desperately expanding their search way beyond 1791 to include things like an English prohibition on "launcegays" from 1383. When they did find timely laws, they ran into a second and far more pressing problem: the laws regulating firearm possession were...awkward. Really awkward.

Judge Benitez overseeing the ongoing Duncan case ordered the state lawyers to compile a list of every single relevant law they could find, and the 56-page spreadsheet they created is incredible. It's not surprising to find governments actively disarming disfavored groups, it's another to see the arbitrariness outlined so starkly. Modern gun control critics have regularly pointed out how skewed enforcement can be, particularly along racial lines. And because Bruen requires historical analogues, lawyers defending gun control restrictions had no choice but to immerse themselves unhappily within its sordid origin story.

Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.), or specifically targeted only slaves (1804 Indiana law, 1804 Mississippi law, 1818 Missouri law, etc.). California had it out particularly for those with "Spanish and Indian blood" (aka what the law called 'Greasers') and prohibited them from possessing firearms in 1855. These are all laws favorably cited in courts today.

When tasked to defend §922(g)(3), the law that prohibits anyone who is an "unlawful user" of a controlled substance from owning a gun, government lawyers tried their best with what little they had. The closest analogues they could find were colonial laws that prohibited actively drunk people, "dangerous lunatics", or what they termed "unvirtuous citizens" from possessing a gun. And you know that's BASICALLY the same thing as preventing the occasional marijuana smoker today from ever having a gun. The judge wasn't convinced.

After languishing in a stalemate for decades, the legal precedent around gun laws has dramatically changed in very quick order thanks to Bruen. Prohibitions on drug users were struck down, a (limited) prohibition for non-violent felons was struck down, and so were prohibitions on individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders (for now...). Courts are normally slow to move, but these developments have happened at blazing speed, and it's only the beginning as there's still plenty of ongoing litigation.

None of this means that gun control advocates have given up, far from it! @gattsuru has extensively catalogued numerous ways anti-gun politicians and judges putting in absolutely heroic efforts to gum up the machinery, however they can. Judge VanDyke publicly accused his colleagues on the 9th Circuit of some robe & dagger procedural shenanigans putting the thumb on the scale in the Duncan case. Meanwhile, legislation of dubious constitutionality gets passed faster than it can be struck down and the NYPD is somehow approving fewer gun permits than before (maybe because their approval stamp fell behind a desk, or something?). The efforts Gattsuru highlighted are definitely a hurdle but we'll see if they're the beginning of a new stalemate, or just desperate cadaveric spasms. For now, I'm going to continue enjoying the spectacle of government lawyers arguing with a straight face to a judge that pot smokers are the historical equivalent of dangerous lunatics.

I don't hesitate to say that the Bruen decision was a masterstroke, especially in the context of advancing an Originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

It 'sneaks' in the idea that the rules mean what they people who wrote them intended them to mean, since presumably the people who wrote the Constitution did so with the intention of making it comply with those other rules and regulations that existed around the time all of this was written, and further if they tolerated a particular rule after the Constitution was ratified, you can certainly argue they didn't intend for the Constitution to contradict those rules, regardless of any ambiguities that may exist.

I'm more of a pure textualist myself, but I do agree with the idea that the rules were written with a particular meaning in mind, and that the proper way to 'change' the rules is... to follow the procedure for changing them. So taking the approach that the rules can just be reinterpreted over and over again, especially in ways that generate greater ambiguity is, in my view, completely antithetical to the idea of having written rules in the first place.

And just about the only way to reduce ambiguity is to ground your interpretive standard on something firm enough to form a valid premise for further legal reasoning. Yes you will never be able to reach the perfect a priori premises from which all else will flow, but anything that doesn't at least directly build off of the original text is way too ad hoc to provide a predictable/reliable jurisprudence, especially as your system of interlocking precedents gets more complex. In my genuine opinion, anyway. This is why I agree with Dobbs overturning Roe irrespective of my beliefs about abortion.

So in short, Bruen's requirement that government has to demonstrate that their restrictions on firearms rights are in keeping with traditional, long-accepted regulations going back to (ideally) the original founding of the country puts the burden of proof in the right place. The State doesn't have a heavy burden, it's just a very restrictive framework to work within... which to me is the point of having those restrictions.

And if we (i.e. the people of the country) can't agree that looking at the rules in place when our Nation was formally founded is at least a guideline for figuring out what the actual words in the document meant, then we're fundamentally questioning the validity of the document itself. Which is fine with me, but for some reason people want to maintain the validity of the document whilst changing the rules it contains to suit their purposes.

If Bruen is carried through to its logical conclusion, we should probably expect that we'll be getting legal machine guns (new ones, not grandfathered) in the not-too-distant future.

If the logic behind Bruen is applied to other aspects of the Constitution, a lot of precedents that are nearly a century old are potentially on the chopping block. And oh boy Justice Thomas seems positively GIDDY to start swinging that axe.

And being clear, I think this creates an interesting double-bind if you want to keep some of those precedents in place. "You can't touch these cases, they've been around for decades!" is easily rebutted by "the standard we're now using to examine those cases goes back a whole century or so before those cases were decided, so if age is the question, this standard wins." You'd have a hard time arguing "the older a judicial precedent is the more deference the Court should grant it!" AND say "but times change and the law has to change with it."

Hence the progressive Justices tend to appeal to more nebulous concepts when reaching a decision, allowing for reconsideration later.

If Bruen is carried through to its logical conclusion, we should probably expect that we'll be getting legal machine guns (new ones, not grandfathered) in the not-too-distant future.

That's a very Laconic "if". We haven't seen any such challenges. Nor challenges to laws against interstate sale of firearms (which are definitely not historically supported), nor any of the other various Federal laws. Bruen was obiter dictum from the moment it was issued; almost no one will get relief from it.

Several cases have raised the claim that the NFA is unconstitutional but they generally haven't gone anywhere. In particular the AutoKeyCard case raised it though doesn't rely on it (unsurprising given that Matt Larosiere is one of the defense attorneys in that case) but that one lost in an odd way related to jury decisions on definitions.

And that's what's going to keep happening. All attempts to challenge will end up in a procedural morass or get dismissed based on other issues, to avoid courts (even, perhaps especially, conservative courts) having to confront the fact that a "right to keep and bear arms" means people do in fact get to have guns. Until the Court swings back anti-gun at which point the RKBA will be extinguished once and for all.

Oh good point bringing up interstate commerce.

Justice Thomas has made his thoughts on the breadth of the Commerce Clause known as well:

https://www.acslaw.org/?post_type=acsblog&p=1066

That's not to say he gets what he wants, but you're thinking in the correct direction for where things might go!

whilst changing the rules it contains to suit their purposes.

You seem to be implying that jurisprudence that takes a narrow view of the rights afforded under the 2nd amendment is somehow a recent innovation or reinterpretation, but the collective rights interpretation runs back for almost two centuries. See Aymette v. State of Tennessee (1840), which upheld a ban on the concealed carrying of weapons - in that particular case a knife. The key here was no just the militia but what 'bear arms' could reasonably be considered to include;

To make this view of the case still more clear, we may remark that the phrase, "bear arms," is used in the Kentucky constitution as well as in our own, and implies, as has already been suggested, their military use. The 28th section of our bill of rights provides "that no citizen of this State shall be compelled to bear arms provided he will pay an equivalent, to be ascertained by law." Here we know that the phrase has a military sense, and no other; and we must infer that it is used in the same sense in the 26th section, which secures to the citizen the right to bear arms. A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he had a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane. So that, with deference, we think the argument of the court in the case referred to, even upon the question it has debated, is defective and inconclusive.

See also State v. Buzzard (1842), City of Salina v. Blaskley (1905) and US v. Adams (1935).

That's not the collective right interpretation though. It's the Miller standard of bearing arms useful for war, orthogonal to individual versus collective. Meanwhile some nobody Lysander Spooner writing in 1856 noted the right as individual and for personal defense as much for militia service. Or Charles Humphrey writing in 1822 "that in this country the constitution guarranties to all persons the right to bear arms." Warren Burger was a tool.

On reflection my comment was poorly written, but both Aymette and Buzzard cover collective rights no?

From Buzzard (Ringo);

That object could not have been to protect or redress by individual force, such rights as are merely private and individual, as has been already, it is believed, sufficiently shown: consequently, the object must have been to provide an additional security for the public liberty and the free institutions of the State, as no other important object is perceived, which the reservation of such right could have been designed to effect. Besides which, the language used appears to indicate, distinctly, that this, and this alone, was the object for which the article under consideration was adopted. And it is equally apparent, that a well regulated militia was considered by the people as the best security a free state could have, or at least, the best within their power to provide.

The question of arms useful for war is closely connected to this because if the purpose of the 2nd Amendment (or state equivalents) was collective then it would provide no protection for arms both not 'borne' in fact and not able to be borne under any circumstances.

Lysander Spooner

Indeed so, my point here is not to suggest that there is no equal tradition of, and evidence for, an individual right interpretation, merely to contest the point in the comment I replied to that more restrictive interpretations being deployed now are simply innovations that not even their proponents believe are consistent with the Constitution. While we are here though, see the reverse case from Benjamin Oliver, Rights of an American Citizen (1832);

The provision of the constitution, declaring the right of the people to keep and bear arms, &c., was probably intended to apply to the right of the people to bear arms for such purposes only, and not to prevent congress or the legislatures of the different states from enacting laws to prevent the citizens from always going armed. A different construction however has been given to it.

So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.

No, it hasn't. I still can't legally buy a gun in New Jersey. Nor can I legally carry one. Nor have >10 round capacity magazines been made legal. Nor is it legal to carry even with a permit in most of New York City, which (as you note) has issued even fewer permits than it did before Bruen. There's no way for a civilian to carry in either state even with a permit without risking a felony, because so many places are off-limits. And the courts have shown no appetite for overturning any of this, instead slow-walking them and doing things like requiring a very strict definition of standing for each particular provision they want to challenge.

That one Oklahoma Federal judge has issued a decision that will likely be overturned by even a conservative court of appeals doesn't change that. And none of this is "blazing speed". Blazing speed is "gay marriage after Obergefell", not gun rights after not one but three Supreme Court decisions that are largely ignored.

I agree with you that blue states and jurisdictions continue to try their hardest to gum up the works, I cited several examples in my last paragraph. Do you think any solution is possible?

For me I think the problem is that none of the conservatives on the court really wants unrestricted firearm ownership. Obergefell's ruling is very simply stated: you cannot deny marriage to gay couples. In contrast there is no similarly bright line rule applicable to 2A. Bruen still requires a meandering and torturous analysis about finding historical analogues and then squinting to determine if it's close enough. On top of that the opinion is littered with arbitrary exceptions about "sensitive places", and while Bruen mostly dodged the question about felon-in-possession, other courts seized upon the Heller language about "law-abiding citizens" to imply that felon-in-possession laws are still valid.

You could issue a ruling that just says "No one can ever be prohibited from possessing a firearm" and "No places can ever prohibit possessing a firearm" and that wouldn't have any ambiguity at all. Except there's no appetite for allowing criminals the right to open-carry in courtrooms, and so we're stuck with this twisted flowchart instead.

I agree with you that blue states and jurisdictions continue to try their hardest to gum up the works, I cited several examples in my last paragraph. Do you think any solution is possible?

The solution will be that the anti-gunners gain control of the Supreme Court and interpret the 2nd amendment into oblivion, and the lower courts (including more pro-gun ones) fall into line. Everything until then is just a holding action.

The reason the only thing with a chance of working is "no restrictions period" (and even then it might not work) is because the other branches of government and many of the lower courts do not accept the authority of the Supreme Court on this issue. And the Supreme Court is either unwilling or unable to do anything to make them fall in line. Possibly, as you suggest, because these conservatives don't actually want people to have gun rights -- rather, they want the moral victory, the situation "Of course you have a right to keep and bear arms, but you can't have a GUN". Much as we've sometimes seen "you have free speech, but free speech doesn't mean you can say THAT" (first from conservatives and later from progressives).

I agree with you that blue states and jurisdictions continue to try their hardest to gum up the works, I cited several examples in my last paragraph. Do you think any solution is possible?

I think it depends a bit on what you call a 'solution'. I don't think (and don't think it would even be 'fair') were Heller or Bruen to result in completely unrestricted firearm ownership. Obergefell lead to Bostock, but it wasn't written in stone the day Obergefell was announced. Hell, there are a lot of restrictions that I think are legitimately within the range of political discussion.

On the other hand, I think these cases absolutely, by central holding and by dicta, prohibit arbitrary restrictions on bare possession or carry of firearms in public places, respectively -- there's a reason so much lower court massive resistance depends on and actively cites the dissents. Yes, there might be some quibbling about how much Bruen breaks out 'sensitive places', but we're not just (or even mostly!) seeing examples close to "sensitive places such as schools and government buildings", but rather ones close to New York City's argument of all “places where people typically congregate and where law-enforcement and other public-safety professionals are presumptively available” that Bruen explicitly rejected. Several areas have done so to hilariously aggressive extents, or required ridiculous fees (sometimes while violating state law!), or with longer-than-year delays, or required a permit per gun (sometimes with total limits), or a thousand similar things. There have even been many restrictions that violate other constitutional principles.

Which... I don't expect people to play nice. I'd have more respect if these jurisdictions weren't making these rules, or heavily anti-gun judges were treating Bruen even by its own strict text, but we have seen several decades of people doing (if slightly more measured) futzing around at the edges for matters like free speech zones or abortion restrictions or gerrymandering cases.

But we've also seen a few dozen cases of people doing those matters and getting slapped down near-instantly, and in many cases the more extreme the gamesmanship or the more overt the intent to defy SCOTUS (or just appeals courts!) the more courts have been willing to step in early and given other expansive rulings. There are some exceptions -- the Texas SB8 law was very much made so that it would require a massive break from normal processes to make an early ruling, even compared to typical interventions -- but for the most part they are exceptions.

By contrast, that doesn't seem to have happened almost anywhere, here or in a number of Red Tribe matters. Several laws on matters of age restrictions or permit delays or gun violence restraining orders have been constructed such that they can not possibly be heard to even appeals level, nevermind SCOTUS, which should drive Robert's supposed anti-gamesmanship instincts up the wall, and there are several well-established exceptions (some, like those that apply for GVROs, which are favored)... and they haven't. In some cases, even as SCOTUS was the last resort before final closure of a case. We don't see much progress by the shadow docket, by the limited available interlocutory appeals, or what have you, nor were any nearby case to Bruen summarily reversed.

Some of that's principles. I'm glad, for example, that Thomas has not suddenly developed a strong lust for national preliminary injunctions.

But a lot of it's pretty clearly not. I don't think this points to SCOTUS being hesitant about a clear standard giving convicted felons concealed carry permits, in no small part because this issue is present in extremely constrained cases. My guess is that Roberts, at minimum, is highly aware of what could charitably be called the "dignity of the court", and more realistically be called the New York Times cocktail circuit, and he and at least a couple others are intensely aware that even the most minimal and sanely-uncontroversial decisions they sign on would become A Cause Celebre.

Thomas's "text, history, and tradition test" (and Kavanaugh before his appointment, and VanDyke and Butamay had pushed it as well pre-Bruen) can be seen within that framework. Not that they're surprised (maybe disappointed) that anti-gun states have been willing to lunge to and swallow the most racist and sexist and otherwise bigoted laws, or even that lower courts will condone them doing so, but when the case goes up, there'll at least be a Scylla to the Charybdis.

But I'm not as optimistic as you are on that. I've been wrong before, as Bruen itself evidences; maybe as we get away from the COVID years and as lower courts have some percolating information, they'll come down like a sack of hammers. Yet instead we're seeing fewer cases with cert granted, not more. Nor has this particular sea monster lead to awful publicity and meaningful impact in the past, as evidenced by how long after the yearbook drop that Governor We-Still-Don't-Know-If-It's-Blackface-or-KKK-Hoods lasted without any serious challenges from the left because of it.

Excellent pushback as always! There is indeed active belligerent resistance. The reason I am still hopeful is that prohibitions like the felon-in-possession were treated as sacrosanct for decades and had virtually no judges willing to even entertain the notion. I know the bar is low but the fact that the edifice is being chipped away even for bad optics cases like someone subject to a DVRO is groundbreaking stuff. I would have never predicted that to be on the table a few years ago.

What you're missing is the DVRO case is not the edifice being chipped away. It's an invitation for higher courts to reverse or limit Bruen. The idea being that you start from the position that any decision that allows nasty defendants like this one to win must be wrong; therefore, some limit must be found to Bruen which makes it wrong.

Maybe! I don't know what the future holds or why SCOTUS decided to take this case so quickly after Bruen. If the goal of the pro-gun Justices was to strike down the DVRO ruling, it highlights the absence of a coherent position on this issue. I'm against categorical prohibitions (like banning all felons from possessing a gun, no matter how old or non-violent their charge is) but open to individualized prohibitions (like disarming someone experiencing psychosis) and this would actually be in accord with some early history of gun prohibition in this country. I'm not sure the pro-gun Justices are willing to bite the bullet on this one, so I won't be surprised with future 2A rulings that are the equivalent of "guns are a right, but not like that!"

Maybe! I don't know what the future holds or why SCOTUS decided to take this case so quickly after Bruen.

It's very suggestive that they took Rahimi, which went pro-gun, rather than any of the various cases where the lower courts have been foot-dragging. IMO, it signals they're going to backpedal.

All interesting enough, but Dick Heller still doesn't have a carry license twenty years after filing his lawsuit and fifteen after winning it, so it's all navel-gazing.

The Supreme Court does not enforce their decisions, and the lower courts are in full revolt.

They can lose every case and yet the law of the land remains in direct opposition to the SC decisions.

It's almost as if the court system is as much LARP as congress.

To be fair, Heller did get a carry permit in the aftermath of Wrenn v DC, which struck down may-issue permits in DC. He can't carry anywhere meaningful or with the gun he originally wanted back in Heller I, hence why he's now on Heller IV fighting both ridiculous limits on carryable arms/ammo and an overly broad and unclear definition of sensitive places, and the permit process is both very slow and very expensive.

Once you've won multiple cases at the Supreme Court level and still aren't getting what you want, you need to admit the process is not going to work and will not do it for you. But conservatives will not admit that the process doesn't work, not ever. There's never a reason to go outside the process; if they thoguht there were, they wouldn't be conservatives.

To be fair, if lower courts were this resistant to "civil rights" supreme court cases, the national guard would be occupying city hall in most major cities.

Either that or we'd still have slaves in the most populous parts of the country.

Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.)

Seems like the practice of declaring the Constitution says whatever you want it to say, text be damned, is a longstanding one. "Unless you're black" is a heck of an asterisk.

It took about 7 years for a sweeping "don't criticize the government" censorship bill to get passed (Sedition Act), though at least it was widely unpopular and they got rid of it.

Ah, our poor silly ancestors... if only they'd known the modern trick of saying they were keeping the public "safe" from "misinformation".

It's more that the OG Bill of Rights was only enforceable against the Federal government, not the States.

It is more likely than not that the Reconstruction Congress intended the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment to make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the States ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States") but the corrupt pro-South Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Rather than doing the sensible thing and just overruling Slaughterhouse alongside Plessey as bad Jim Crow law, the Civil Rights era SCOTUS used substantive due process to enforce these rights - as late as 2010 SCOTUS rejected the argument that the 2nd amendment was directly enforceable against the states under the privileges and immunities clause. So there is a whole line of silly doctrine that takes the 14th seriously while claiming not to.

In my view, there is a good originalist argument against incorporating the 2nd amendment against the States. The corresponding argument against incorporating the Establishment clause of the 1st amendment has been endorsed by Clarence Thomas in some of his dissents and concurrences. Based on the text, the original purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the State militias against Federal interference. (This is perfectly compatible with the idea that the 2nd amendment created an individual right enforceable against the Federal government - State militias were not required to and often did not keep membership rolls at the time, so many militia members were "just private gun owners" on paper). Incorporating the amendment against the States takes away the States' right to regulate their own militias, so it changes the nature of the right protected, whereas incorporating a right like trial by jury only changes the scope of the remedy available. Similarly, the Establishment clause was intended to protect State-level established religions (like Massachusetts puritanism) from Federal interference, not ban them.

Obviously nobody is going to make that argument, because it gores both sides' oxen.

You present a cogent argument for narrowly interpreting 2A. For this to make sense though, you have to interpret "the right of the people" in 2A to really mean "the right of the States" and that's when you run into big problems. If you read the rest of the Constitution and the Bill of rights, there's multiple references to "the people" and none of them make sense with that substitution. Consider 1A ("...or the right of the States peaceably to assemble") or 4A ("The right of the States to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures") or the neglected 10A which explicitly distinguishes States from the people. It seems odd to me to think that the Founders were willing to throw casual usage of the people all over the place, but when they wrote 2A they meant it in this very specific way and didn't bother putting an asterisk or anything.

I agree with you that any approach to interpretation which starts with the enacted text has to conclude that “the people” in the 2A creates an individual right enforceable against the Feds. The question is whether the non-enforceability of the 1789 2A against the States is about the nature and purpose of the right (in which case it still isn’t enforceable against the States) or about the nature of the remedy at the time of the founding (in line with other rights, enforcement of the RKBA against States was supposed to be based on the RKBA clauses in State constitutions, adjudicated in State courts). In the latter case, it becomes enforceable against the States as a result of the 14A.

The other way of thinking about it is about the various founding-era state legislatures who ratified the 2A at the same time they were passing laws against free blacks owning guns. Were they blithely passing legislation that violated their own understanding of the RKBA because they were unprincipled racists, or were they regulating their own militias in an obnoxiously racist way based on a sincere view of the powers they actually held? AFAIK none of the other founding-era laws restricting the rights of free blacks were obviously inconsistent with the Bill of Rights as the gun laws were under the modern Red Tribe understanding of the RKBA.

Seems like you should probably look to Scott v Sandford for some contextual clarity for the time about laws restricting rights as applied to people who may not have been considered entitled to them. The actual decision is in the national archives and should be read not summaries or opinion pieces.

Your second paragraph is, genuinely, the first time I've heard a remotely coherent explanation for how someone could read the text of the Second Amendment and conclude that state-level firearms restrictions are permissible. I realize this is incredibly naive, but I consistently just kind of forget that Bill of Rights simply didn't restrict states in the way it does the federal government. I suspect that you're correct regarding this not getting brought up much because of implications for other rights.

For the second amendment and local gun restrictions it would perhaps fall under the interstate commerce clause. But I haven’t seen others make this argument on local restrictions.

If the Feds can’t ban guns and they are a part of commerce then it would probably have interstate commerce implications. Being that the interstate commerce clause applies to just about everything then that would seem to restrict the states on 2A.

If we had a narrow commerce clause then I would think States could ban you from having a machine gun on broadway but not ban you from shipping machine guns. But the current usage seems to be if there is any commercial interests like a gun manufacturer in Virginia making more money if a buyer exists in NYC it would still seem to give a way to prohibit any local regulations.

Fascinating! I have no idea if it's true or not but I love it as a theory.

In Washington we had a judge rule that magazines aren’t firearms and so aren’t subject to Bruen.

Every time I see this kind of behavior I wonder if the judges reflect on the intended purpose of the second amendment and proceed to ignore the constitution anyway. A refreshing of the tree of liberty would surely swamp any possible deaths averted from magazine restrictions and assault weapons bans.

I can't wait for another judge to rule that an inkjet printer isn't a press, therefore (many) newspapers aren't covered under the First Amendment. Or that we aren't currently in a "time of peace", therefore the Third Amendment isn't in effect. Or maybe we can keep violating the Eighth Amendment until those punishments aren't "unusual" anymore, then they would be retroactively permitted.

The intended purpose of the second amendment was to protect the States' right to regulate their own militias, not to abolish it - the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were either anti-Federalists or Federalists negotiating a compromise with them and would have been horrified if they thought they were allowing Federal courts to strike down State gun laws. The Heller line of cases say that the due process clause of the 14th amendment created an individual right analogous to the 2nd amendment but enforceable against the States and are probably correct, but this isn't an argument based on 1789 original intent.

The intended purpose of the second amendment was to protect the States' right to regulate their own militias

Explain. My understanding has always been that there is but one militia here and that it "consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard".

But does overturning the ban on domestic abusers getting guns really do a lot to aid that original purpose?

What percentage of the revolutionary militia were we expecting to be habitual wife beaters, exactly? I think we'll be ok without them.

That's my position, if someone proposed a bill that would actually decrease gun ownership a significant amount - say, 10% - then I'd be onboard with saying 'this is a threat to the ability of 2A to protect us against tyranny'.

But AFAICT, most of the skirmishes are over very limited laws that make it harder for criminals to get guns, or impose inconveniences that annoy gun owners but don't stop them from being gun owners.

But does overturning the ban on domestic abusers getting guns really do a lot to aid that original purpose?

Unless I'm misremembering, the actual ruling was regarding domestic violence restraining orders. (PDF WARNING). Which is to say, people who have not been tried for or convicted of the crime of domestic abuse/battery, but rather where there's someone who can convince a judge that they are in danger of violence from this person, and thus an injunction to keep that person away is a necessary remedy.

So a person against whom such an injunction is granted is NOT a convicted criminal just because the injunction was granted.

I think this is an important distinction, as it also brings up the need for due process protections. The standards for proving a domestic violence injunction are much lower than for obtaining a criminal conviction, and they're usually considered a civil matter (i.e. it is the person acting on their own behalf, not the state acting on behalf of society, no prosecutor is even involved). An individual can request that a given person be forced to stay away from them if they're a threat, but it makes much less sense for a person to demand that that someone else must sacrifice additional rights in their entirety.

So a law which removes ALL of a person's firearm rights on the sayso of a single person is a pretty serious restriction to impose on somebody who has not been arrested, much less convicted of a crime.

In terms of protecting people's rights from infringement without some proven criminal conduct I think it does help that original purpose, yes.

Indeed, an injunction that takes away a person's gun rights doesn't provide much extra protection to the alleged victim. If that person wants to ignore that restriction and hurt someone, doubtful that piece of paper will stop them. So I don't think victims' safety is hampered much by the firearm ban.

If the state can convict the person of domestic violence crimes, then we're in the world of violent criminals, and all kinds of punishments, including prison and removal of gun rights are on the table.

While yes Rahimi is about a conviction under 922(g)(8) for possession while under a DVRO, it's complicated by Rahimi being an exceptionally unsympathetic individual which makes it politically very easy to paint his defense as a bad thing. The firearms that he is being charged with possessing in violation of the order were discovered while his premises were searched under warrant for other crimes.

DOJ said he has been accused of taking part in at least five different shootings over the course of six weeks between December 2020 and January 2021. Those incidents ranged from Rahimi shooting at someone he’s also accused of selling Percocet to, shooting at another person he cut off in traffic, and firing a gun into the air at a Whataburger because his friend’s credit card had been declined.

The DVRO was issued Feb 2020 for context.

Why is this an argument for disarming him through a DRVO, rather than an argument for jailing him pending inescapable felony conviction and a decade or more in prison?

You have your timeline confused. He was already under the DVRO before those other crimes occurred. While doing the needful in investigating those other crimes they found evidence for an easy conviction of possession of a firearm while under a court restraining order. His defense attorney is using Bruen to dispute that charge specifically. The case before SCOTUS doesn't actually touch those other charges at all.

To clarify the actual argument is whether or not the federal crime of possessing/acquiring a firearm (that interacts with interstate commerce but that's basically a fig leaf) while under a court issued restraining order is constitutional. This gets abbreviated to whether or not a restraining order with its lower standards of proof and potential one-sided issuance is sufficient and constitutional to deny someone their constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms. Shorter: restraining orders disarming gun owners constitutional yea/nay?

And his record was clean before the DVRO?

I appreciate the correction, and I guess the argument is that under the proposed system, they could have disarmed him when the DVRO went through? But if his record was not clean prior, that just pushes the question back: the sort of person who fires warning shots over a credit card declined at Whataburger is the sort of person who should not be on the streets at all, and this is probably knowable before he shoots up a Whataburger. Disarming him (How? By who? What if he arms himself again?) but leaving him free is an entirely insufficient response.

And his record was clean before the DVRO?

As far the record exists in the case yes. Notionally he should have been disarmed when the DVRO was issued. The practical application of that would require the court/police to be aware of existing firearms (the person asking for the order might be aware, the person accused is not exactly incentivized to bring up their ownership) and then proactively disarm (expensive, dangerous) rather than simply ordering it be done. Keeping in mind that the DVRO was under state court and the possession is a federal offence. In some jurisdictions compliance can also be done by storing firearms at a club/FFL rather than having to sell off/surrender them to the police so even verifying compliance with the order has friction.

It shall be unlawful for any person[] who is subject to a court order that[:] (A) was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had an opportunity to participate; (B) restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child; and (C)(i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury . . . to . . . possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition . . . .

As for acquiring, the only thing stopping a 4473 from going through after the order is in effect is if the court that issued the order is tied into the state background check system or the national one to catch someone lying on question 21.i or the person under the restraining order answering that question truthfully. (All of question 21 on that form is basically an IQ check or cya documentation used to prosecute if you lie on it and then publicly admit to doing things that conflict with your answers on that form as in the recent case of a rather famous failson.) And of course it's entirely possible to acquire a firearm without a 4473 and in those circumstances the ability to verify that someone is not restricted is rather limited.

To get around that second problem some states have made it illegal to transfer a firearm without a 4473. And the way they enforce that has been... catching someone after the fact with incontrovertible proof they violated that law. That proof being rather difficult because most of those universal background check states still have various exemptions for gifts/inheritance/loans to avoid awkward things like having to stop at an FFL to let your friend "possess" your firearm during a day at the range. Yesterday's reasonable exception is today's loophole.

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Haha yeah that is about the platonic ideal of the "violent criminal" type who really should not be trusted with firearms and is without a doubt a danger to society in general and the subject of the DVRO in particular.

But there's a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that I often recall when reading these decisions:

"It is a fair summary of constitutional history that the landmarks of our liberties have often been forged in cases involving not very nice people."

And that's fundamentally because the common law is forged out of conflict. Someone ran afoul of and challenged a given law's restrictions. And nice, peaceable citizens are far less likely to find themselves in conflicts with the state than... that guy.

So while strategically you want to mount an appeal using the most sympathetic parties possible, in practice the proof that "the law applies to everyone" is to bring up those unappealing miscreants and, holding your nose all the way, defend against the violations of their rights the same as anyone else's.

That the Supreme Court doesn't decide cases based on their empathy for the parties or their victims is a good sign that they're doing their best to be 'impartial.'

I accept all of that as good critiques of the law, and perhaps sufficient reason to overturn it if it can't be reformed to meet those objections.

But I don't think it addresses my point, which was that these laws don't affect enough people to meaningfully interfere with the 'state should fear its people' value of 2A.

That's a rather Borkian view. The 2nd Amendment says "..shall not be infringed", not "..shall not be removed completely". While punishing a Klan leader for saying "it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken" probably doesn't materially restrict the range of political discourse in the United States, it's still an abridgement of freedom of speech; by the same token some gun law which prevents some people from having arms but doesn't wholesale remove the right is still an infringement of the right to keep and bear arms.

Sure, I was replying to a specific comment making that specific argument.

The whole thing about "fundamental rights" as an ideal is they are supposed to protect every person in an individual level, and not make it so the state can get away with passing unconstitutional laws so long as most of the population will never run afoul of them.

If you were SCOTUS you surely could promulgate a standard setting some threshold. "Unless this law interferes with 5% of the populations exercise of their rights, it is presumptively non-infringing."

I, for one am concerned about the gamesmanship by the states this might encourage (worse than they do already!) And other possible second-order effects.

But AFAICT, most of the skirmishes are over very limited laws that make it harder for criminals to get guns, or impose inconveniences that annoy gun owners but don't stop them from being gun owners.

I think this is a bad model, dependent on either reframing the 2nd Amendment such that owning a muzzleloader and five rounds, without the ability to carry them anywhere but one specified range and gunsmith, counts. Just of matters currently under consideration before the Supreme Court:

  • NRA v. Vullo (prev here, background here) is about a dedicated effort to use regulatory systems against the speech of a private organization.

  • Gazolla v. United States has a state that bans carry so broadly that its own politicians said people might be able to carry on some sidewalks, requires a permit that didn't exist for semiautomatic rifles, and does 'background checks' for ammunition that don't work (and probably violates federal law doing so) -- which it is not the only one doing.

  • Nichols v Newsom is a complete ban on open carry, at the same time that the state has many jurisdictions ponderously slow or simply nonresponsive for concealed carry permits, as well as a 1000 ft buffer zone for any carry near any school.

  • KCL v. Eighth Judicial is a product liability case that threatens any ammunition, firearm accessory, or related material business.

Even for cases that look like they're about convenience or criminals often are concerned about broader impact:

  • Garland v. VanDerStock, Garland v. Cargill, Guedes v. ATF, and Garland v. Hardin all involve Scary Guns That Aren't Popular, but they also involve the federal government retroactively banning guns or firearm accessories that have been legal (and authorized by the ATF!) for decades, without compensation, and with no limiting principle.

  • Rahimi involves the sort of dangerous criminal that people expect to be a big issue (and is notably brought by public defenders rather than gun orgs), but Garland v. Range is about making it harder for a food stamp criminal to get guns. Previous cases have disqualified a person for a 33-year-old conviction for selling counterfeit cassettes; some state laws have tried to provide increasingly restrict background checks to such a level that New York's current system does not even have a full list of disqualifying traits.

And when you go broader there are far more concerns.

Far have we strayed from the origins of LW. Inconveniences are hardly trivial and many of them just coincidentally happen to most inconvenience the point of entry into the funnel of gun culture. Good faith at this point has to be proven and compromise has to involve give and take, not compromising on only taking 50% instead of 100% of the original ask.

I mean, I agree that a priori you can expect systemic inconveniences to have large downstream effects, sure, that's something you should always check for.

But the best way to check for that is to actually look at the data, and as far as I can tell, gun ownership rates haven't dropped in the last 20 years, despite all the measures passed in that timeframe.

It just doesn't look like any of these recent measures have actually decreased gun ownership, so I don't think the argument that they are disarming the citizenry and making them weak to tyrants holds water.

There are lots of other good arguments against these measures, just not that one, AFAICT.

The data is garbage. Most of the restrictions are going to be state level and most data is national. Most of the data is self reported surveys about a politically charged topic where people have had a strong incentive to lie since the 90s and unlike an election where you can validate something like the shy-tory effect in polling, there is no ground truth data point to calibrate against. Sales cannot distinguish a new owner from an existing owner buying their 30th firearm. (That first versus 30th is a classic example against waiting periods as implemented since they rarely/never allow someone who has already purchased a firearm previously to opt out which is nonsensical given the justifications for them.) Keep in mind also twenty years ago the AWB was still in effect, while forty years ago it didn't exist and sixty years ago the GCA didn't even exist so firearms could be mail ordered and there were no background checks then. Never mind the demographic changes over decades from urbanization and the downstream cultural effects. I'd wager that relative to sixty years ago there are far fewer gun owners per capita.

This is a weird metric to focus on. Gun control measures tend to cause gun sales to spike, even as they restrict the citizen's ability to wage war.

Prior to our magazine ban going into effect I bought a bunch of magazines for guns I didn't even own, but might want to in the future.

This is not my area of expertise, but 'People buy more guns and become less able to wage war' seems inherently self-contradictory to me. Could you explain what you mean in a bit more detail?

Not the individual you replied to but making things illegal and successfully restricting them neuters what people have access to, even if more people decide to pursue that thing.. Californians can own guns, but some of their options end up being rather pitiful.

Even if a gun law encourages more people to buy guns- the guns they can buy are suddenly rendered more impotent. As an extreme example, if everyone were given a musket a day before guns became impossible to buy legally from then on, more people would have guns, but people's ability to wage war would be hampered quite severely.

You’re going to have a much harder time achieving fire superiority with a fixed magazine bolt action rifle than with a detachable magazine semiautomatic.

With inferior firepower, you’ll need far more men to keep the enemy ducking instead of returning fire.

I think the issue is more about being able to ban firearms from some people without having to convict them of a specific crime and thus having a trial. If I don’t like you, I can file for a restraining order, and if I’m successful, then I can essentially get the government to take your guns and forbid you from purchasing more. And thus you lose your rights but don’t get a defense.

I’m especially concerned where it concerns mental health simply because there’s no real process to remove that designation once you have it. Worse, it’s a very strong incentive to avoid contact with mental health services if you think you might need them but also don’t want to give up the guns for various reasons.

But AFAICT, most of the skirmishes are over very limited laws that make it harder for criminals to get guns, or impose inconveniences that annoy gun owners but don't stop them from being gun owners.

The biggest skirmish is over assault weapons bans, whatever those are. Others are over things which, as you note, impose inconveniences that annoy gun owners and do nothing else. I can’t think of anything the gun controllers have proposed which would make it harder for criminals to get guns, however.

That is the big thing for me. I’ve never seen a proposal that would get guns out of the hands of those who commit the vast majority of gun crimes. Even moreso a lot of the lefties are anti-gun and against putting black people in jail. And to cut the murder rate you would be putting a lot of black people in jail for gun possession. Some of them are probably honest that they would get rid of the entire second amendment. Anything that is proposed might cut down on one crazy mass shooting a year but be a huge annoyance to legitimate gun owners.

What percentage of the revolutionary militia were we expecting to be habitual wife beaters, exactly? I think we'll be ok without them.

Approximately all of them, based on current standards of domestic violence. Minor physical punishments (slaps, spanking etc.) were common for men to apply to their wives if they misbehaved, just as they were applied to children. You'll have to cast aside more than just the militiamen.

California has a likely new Senator, and her background is a doozy if you're someone as cynical as I am about political figures. With Diane Feinstein having died, Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like, and had promised that the position would be selected from a strict affirmative action pool of black women. He apparently failed to find anyone that actually lives in California that fits the bill, so he has instead selected Maryland resident Laphonza Butler for the position. What, you might ask, are her exquisite qualifications that would make her the top candidate for such an important position? Wiki's summary suffices:

Butler began her career as a union organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee, janitors in Philadelphia, and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she moved to California, organizing in-home caregivers and nurses, and served as president of SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, SEIU Local 2015.[4][5][6]

Butler was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013. She undertook efforts to boost California's minimum wage and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.[4] As president of SEIU Local 2015, Butler endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.[7]

In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California.[6] She resigned from her role as regent in 2021.[8]

Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.[9] She was known as a political ally of Harris since her first run for California Attorney General in 2010, when she helped Harris negotiate a shared SEIU endorsement in the race.[4][10]

Butler left SCRB in 2020 to join Airbnb as director of public policy and campaigns in North America.[11][5]

Butler was named the third president of EMILY's List in 2021. She was the first Black woman and mother to lead the organization.[12][4]

What exactly is EMILY's List?

EMILY's List is an American political action committee (PAC) that aims to help elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights to office. It was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985.[4] The group's name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast". Malcolm commented that "it makes the dough rise".[4] The saying refers to a convention of political fundraising: receiving many donations early in a race helps attract subsequent donors. EMILY's List bundles contributions to the campaigns of Democratic women in favor of abortion rights running in targeted races.[5][6]

From 1985 through 2008, EMILY's List raised $240 million for political candidates.[1] EMILY's List spent $27.4 million in 2010, $34 million in 2012, and $44.9 million in 2014.[3] The organization was on track to raise $60 million for the 2016 election cycle, much of it earmarked for Hillary Clinton, whose presidential bid EMILY's List had endorsed.[7]

Chalk up a win for patronage models of politics! This is someone whose entire career is built on raising money for politicians, culminating in heading a powerful PAC that is more explicitly built around money, money, money even in their very naming than any other PAC I've seen. Obviously, anyone paying attention knows that PACs are always about raising money and that's their express purpose, but I don't think I've seen one literally just make their name an acronym for the patronage enthusiasm. Big donors give money to politicians and get what they want and the organizer for acquiring that wealth is awarded with a seat in the Senate. In all, I see three things of note that are often the subtext of various choices and decisions, but I rarely see so blatantly:

  • The appointment will be explicitly about race and gender. If you're anything other than a Black Woman, you need not apply.

  • The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway.

  • The appointment will go to someone that has demonstrated loyalty and usefulness in assisting with the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars to preferred sources.

On the one hand, it's all rather offensive, but on the other hand, I can think of no better Senator from California than a transient grifter that makes her living off of identity politics.

I think it's more productive to imagine who Gavin Newsom might have appointed, given political constraints and his national ambitions.

  1. They have to be a solid Democrat. This is uninteresting and would apply just as much to a Republican appointing a replacement for a Republican Senator.

  2. They can't be someone with ambitions for the seat. This is a bit less obvious, but choosing a particular candidate for the seat gives them a substantial advantage against rivals for the seat and generates bad blood.

2a) They can't be someone who plausibly would have ambitions for the seat. Once appointed, the Senator can very well say "actually I am going to run," which they will if it's best for their political ambitions. There'd be a bloody primary, but the appointee would know that should they win, everyone will rally around them (exact calculations complicated by California's jungle primary system). Newsom, on the other hand, has to deal with the fallout of causing a nasty, bloody primary.

So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions. Within those constraints, why not choose the person who earns you the most diversity points? And that's how you land on Butler. The fact that she's an out-of-state apparatchik is a plus in that constraint context, if anything.

My personal preference, for what it's worth, would have been James Sauls, Feinstein's Chief of Staff. Satisfies all the constraints and provides continuity of service in the meantime.

So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions.

Except that the news story I read about it made a point that she was not barred from running in the proper election. So while I get why Newsom didn't appoint Lee (who seems to be spitting feathers over this), it's because out of the three Representatives going for the seat (Lee, Schiff and Porter) if he picks one, he's going to piss off the other two, and he doesn't need that kind of in-fighting in California. Especially if he has ambitions himself for the presidency in 2028.

Maybe she doesn't have ambitions and/or a local power base, so that's why he didn't put any limits on it, she's not a risk to him while on the other hand elevating a pro-abortion fundraiser will give him that all-important 100% rating from NARAL for the presidential campaigning:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to fill the seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, elevating the head of a fundraising juggernaut that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, according to a person familiar with the decision.

...The announcement was expected to come Monday, and an adviser to the governor, Anthony York, told POLITICO that Newsom is making his appointment without putting limitations or preconditions on his pick running for the seat in 2024. That means Butler could decide to join the sprawling and competitive field of Democratic contenders seeking to succeed Feinstein, with special elections now layered on top of the March primary and November runoff.

Except that the news story I read about it made a point that she was not barred from running in the proper election.

She can run, but she would lose. Even if she somehow miraculously did find a way to run a competitive campaign, the point is that no one in the CDP even slightly believes that Newsom chose her thinking she could win an actual election. It'd be hard for Newsom to choose a less electable candidate intentionally (especially given that, until she establishes residency, she's not even eligible to run). Hence, no bad blood.

As far as her Emily's List work, I agree it's relevant, but with a different mechanism than a quid pro quo; NARAL won't care one way or another about this appointment come next Presidential election cycle. The real reason is that she's deeply ensconced in Democratic machine politics: those are her coworkers, friends, even her partner. Defecting in some unpredictable way would be far too costly to her professional and personal lives, so Newsom believes that she's reliable (and more pertinently, so does everyone else, so on the off chance she does go rogue no one will hold it against him).

I can see why Newsom picked her, she's all upside for him. But I can also see why Barbara Lee is furious about this, because this would be the perfect bedding-in for her in the seat she's wanted for ages, and then she'd have an incumbency advantage going into the primary proper. But if Newsom did that, given that Lee seems to be not guaranteed to win the primary, hence the other two going are strong enough in the party, then he'd piss off two other party members who might cut up rough later (and get their supporters to cut up rough) about playing favourites.

Tricky balancing act: has Lee enough clout to damage him if/when he goes for the nomination in 2028, or will Butler owe him a big enough favour that she can throw the women's and black women's vote behind him?

FWIW, I addressed this some in this comment.

Sauls seems like an excellent choice for, the reasons you outline. As in other comments, I'm really not just trying to whine that a Democrat picked a Democrat, that is both unremarkable and entirely appropriate, especially in a state that certainly will be electing a Democrat. That part is completely fine.

I read some articles over the weekend that Newsom was under pressure to appoint Barbara Lee. Supposedly she's angry that he didn't give her the seat (with all the electoral advantages of the incumbent.)

This pick makes sense. She’s spent her entire career in the Democrats’ political machine in some way or other, so she’s a team player who knows how the sausage gets made. She’s a black lesbian, so intersectionality points. She’s an abortion activist, so her pet issue is one she’ll have a hard time derailing the government over. And she’s a political nonentity who’s probably unelectable on her own, so when she loses in ‘24 she’ll go back to working in the political machine while owing Newsome a favor.

Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.

A union-busting group having a name that so closely resembles "scab" is like something out of a very unsubtle parody.

No, no. They were going for “Some Cops Aren’t Bastards.”

One other point is that she's got zero chance to be competitive in the election next year. So Newsom makes no enemies within the party by favoring one candidate or another.

So Newsom makes no enemies within the party by favoring one candidate or another.

If reports are true, Lee is angry about not being picked. Does this mean she's not as favoured as thought, or that Newsom thinks he can weather any action against him she might take in the party?

On Sunday, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford wrote to Newsom urging him to appoint Rep. Barbara Lee, a candidate for the Senate whom the governor recently ruled out over worries about giving someone a leg up.

Newsom fulfills the promise he made to name a Black woman to the upper chamber following the departure of Harris to the vice presidency and his selection of Sen. Alex Padilla to her old seat in 2021. Newsom also avoids veering directly into next year’s Senate contest between rival Reps. Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Lee, all Democrats from California. Lee had spent years angling for the possible Senate appointment, only to learn in recent weeks that Newsom was intent on not tipping the scales in her favor, prompting her to sharply rebuke his public pronouncement.

Either he miscalculated, or he wouldn't pick Lee anyway so he was going to piss her off in any case, or he figures her support would have been worth less than the enmity of the others had he picked her.

Does this mean she's not as favoured as thought

She is not favored at all, neither by the polls nor by fundraising.

Yikes. On the money end, Porter and Schiff are way ahead of her (for now). No wonder she wanted to be a shoo-in by Newsom. I guess this demonstrates he really does know how to play the game in Californian Democrat internal politics, and that he figures pissing off Lee won't be enough of a liability to harm him when he goes for the big stage, because Butler will deliver the black women's vote for him in quid pro quo.

The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California

An odd argument re someone who moved to California at age 30, was a labor leader in the state, was a regent of the University of California, worked for Kamala Harris, and moved out of state 2 years ago only to pursue a job opportunity

She doesn't live in California. I have associations with states other than the state I presently reside in, including business interests and property ownership, but I would be blatantly and obviously lying if I claimed that I am a legitimate representative of those states.

Let's try it another way - do you think she would be a legitimate representative for Maryland? If so, what parameters are the relevant limiting factor for which state one can represent? In any sense that I would think of as legitimate, you would need to pre-select the state and/or locale that represent, not simply carpetbag to any state that you have a tenuous connection to when it's convenient. I'm sure I have no legal argument on the matter, as carpetbagging is a time-honored and perfectly legal tradition in many cases, but it seems pretty clear to me that you can't actually be simultaneously just as legitimate a representative of Maryland as California.

The relevant factors for which state one can represent are best determined by the voters in that state. It's a persuasive rather than a dispositive factor. It's a perfectly legit criticism to lob, but voters are perfectly free to ignore it if they feel an outsider represents their interests better than an insider for various reasons.

It's a tradition that dates prior to the revolution, wealthy Englishmen were known to buy "rotten boroughs" where there were few enough votes and they were obedient enough that enough money could buy a seat in the Commons.

I'm on the record here crucifying Dr Oz for running for the PA Senate seat, on the other hand I support(Ed) McCormick's run for the same seat. Neither currently lived in PA, McCormick grew up in PA, and his family was prominent in PA before. Oz' ties were based on his in laws and part of his education, at best. That's a judgment I made personally, at the booth.

She doesn't live in California

So, if Jerry Brown had moved to Maryland two years ago to head Emily's List, he would be an illegitimate pick as well? Clearly, "moved to Maryland for a job two years ago" is not per se proof that you can't be a legitimate representative of California.

Correct, my position is that moving to a different state, establishing your residence there, declaring that you reside there, and registering to vote there means that you are no longer a legitimate representative of your former state. I would be open to the position that someone should instead only be eligible for their previous state since two years is obviously not long enough to become legitimate in the new residence. I reject the idea that someone can be Schrödinger's representative, equally legitimate in all places that they could register in once appointed.

Well, that seems a bit extreme, given my Jerry Brown example.

I reject the idea that someone can be Schrödinger's representative, equally legitimate in all places that they could register in once appointed.

That is a strawman that you have created. No one has argued otherwise.

I am indeed the kind of extremist that reads Article I, Section 3 as applicable, even if it were the venerable Jerry Brown that had moved:

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

I guess you can get around that by saying that she's not being elected. That would suggest that it would be perfectly legal to select a teenager from Australia though, which doesn't strike me as likely.

Regarding Schrödinger's representative, I suppose the correct analogy isn't that they could register in any place, but merely that they are equally resident in both places as necessary until declaration. That does seem to be exactly what you're claiming, no? That Butler would be legitimate in Maryland or California and that Brown would likewise be equally legitimate in either place if he moved. As mentioned, I'm open to the suggestion that Brown could only ever be a legitimate representative of California and that two years residence in Maryland wouldn't change that one jot, but it doesn't really match up with a plain reading of the text.

Dude, that is a completely different issue than the one you raised. If Jerry Brown moved to Delaware, he might be constitutionally ineligible to serve as Senator from California, regardless of whether he is capable of representing the interests of Californians. Your claim was re the latter.

I believe those claims are entirely consistent - someone is ineligible precisely because it's fairly obvious that they're not representative of a state that isn't actually their state of residence. This was codified precisely because someone's residence does actually inform us about who they represent.

More comments

She's the mirror image of an ideal Republican candidate. Imagine 'Wayne Johnson' from Appalachia, graduate of UWV, who worked his way up at Koch Industries in Texas. Having done a decade of group organizing for gun rights, Johnson was elected President of a major Republican PAC in Nebraska, and is now being appointed as interim Senator from Texas. Makes sense.

Butler is 45, from a poor Mississippi town of 1,800 residents (currently). She graduated college and worked he way up to a solid position at AirBNB, having long taken leadership positions in union organizing, and is now President of a major PAC.

The only cynical thing I see is that skin color was mandatory for the latter candidate.

For reasons of entertainment, I'm hoping the next elected Senator from California is Meghan Markle. She has identity points, name recognition, and charisma. It would be funny if she ends up with more real power than the British royal family has.

and charisma

This is where it falls down. She really...doesn't. It's pretty telling she has nothing going now, despite being feted by a lot of the famous black elite originally.

Seducing a famously dim and insecure prince isn't a generalizable skill apparently.

My new crackpot theory is that the Palace PR played a blinder here, and it came back to bite them: they made lemonade and got everyone to act like a second-rank name on a third-rate show was Grace Kelly and, unfortunately for them, it stuck.

I hope Meghan Markle runs. She would lose so badly that the resulting humiliation would solve a problem for the Royal Family.

The residency stuff seems almost designed to distract. It's very salient, easy to argue about, but ultimately not as substantial as other criticisms.

If I had two candidates before me, equal in all ways except one has this controversy attached, I'd probably pick the one with the extra controversy. Better that the public debate is about state lines than about my commitment to choose a person of specific race and gender, or about the candidate's meager qualifications.

Perhaps someone more versed in the subject can chime in, but my understanding is the U.S. Constitution dictates that senators must be a resident of the state they represent. In California that means being present in the state for 366 days before filing for residency. Is there any likelihood of this being challenged? Has something like this happened before?

The actual language is

"No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen."

The language of the Seventeenth Amendment provides for replacements:

"When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

So it appears there is no constitutional requirement for an unelected replacement Senator to be an inhabitant of the state they represent.

I am skeptical that the Seventeenth Amendment permits the appointment of someone who is ineligible to serve. However, whether she is eligible depends on what "inhabitant" means. Because there is a very important legal distinction between one's residence and his domicile. Whether "inhabitant" refers to "residence," "domicile" or something else is anybody's guess, but I am very skeptical that this issue has escaped the attention of the Governor, and it is very likely that all that matters is where she lives at the time that she is sworn in.

PS: See this Congressional Research Service report which seems to conclude that the only requirement is that the person be an inhabitant at the time that he or she is sworn in.

Even if we interpret this as a Constitutional requirement that an appointed Senator be a resident of the state, it would be trivial to work around. Newsom could have had her move yesterday and appointed her today.

That said, this was almost certainly a drafting oversight, and Newsom is acting contrary to the spirit of the law. Seriously, there are a million black women in California. How hard could it have been to find one who would reliably vote with party leadership? Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?

Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?

I stand by my commentary above, that "[t]he Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway". While I think GDanning credibly disputes my framing of whether she represents California here I think the punchline is that it doesn't really matter, that if they needed to reward a good soldier in Maryland, they'd reward her there, and if they instead got the opportunity to do it in California, that's fine too. The point is the national politics, not something that got written down a couple centuries ago; after all, they couldn't even fly then, so what did they know about how what it actually means to represent a state?

So it appears there is no constitutional requirement for an unelected replacement Senator to be an inhabitant of the state they represent.

Wasn't there an understanding about US VP that must cover all the eligibility criteria for president even if it is not explicitly stated in the constitution?

Wasn't there an understanding about US VP that must cover all the eligibility criteria for president even if it is not explicitly stated in the constitution?

It is explicitly stated in the Constitution. From the Twelfth Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

She's had a string of jobs in Cali for the last decade, but twitter says she either posted from Maryland, or her bio says Maryland (I don't use twitter). Weighing that evidence, I'd bet she's a California resident.

Edit: actually on her wiki page it says.

They moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in 2021 when she assumed the presidency of EMILY's List.[17][18] Governor Newsom's office stated Butler would reregister to vote in California before taking office as a senator

6% of California's population is black. There are far more Asians and there is simply very little political representation for them. Asians are also a much wealthier bloc. It's actually quite impressive how overrepresented blacks are in California politics (LA Mayor and SF Mayor are both black women) given their lower demographic weight and generally speaking lower socio-economic success, which clearly doesn't impede their political influence.

One wonders if this is solely due to their own talents or if white liberals like Newsom is simply more comfortable with parachuted-in black women than he would be with a high-achieving Asian with roots in the state. So to me this is less about blacks than about relative Asian disempowerment in what is arguably their strongest state outside of Hawaii, coupled with a question if black overrepresentation is perhaps at least partly driven by white liberal preferences for that demographic over Asians.

I suspect many white liberals also support affirmative action because they don't want their kids to be outcompeted by Asian grinds at school and thus prefer lower-scoring blacks and Hispanics to create a more "balanced" milieu. Perhaps this is driven by a similar cultural impulse. This is of course all speculation, but I don't think we can disentangle white liberal preferences when things like this keep happening.

From Newsom’s perspective he doesn’t want to pick winners in the 2024 race, and Butler definitely isn’t going to win.

And his presidential bid, like any ‘moderate’ or business democrat’s, will rely on winning the heavily black southern primaries, where most black voters are black women. This prevents any issues on that front.

So, were you in Newsom’s unenviable shoes, who’d you have picked?

I have a sneaking suspicion that we could write similar blurbs for anyone with any political experience in the state. Even the Republicans. This list was a little more optimistic, suggesting various high-profile Californians and a few local functionaries.

It does mention Ms. Butler, emphasizing her role in the Harris campaign. More important, apparently, are her intersectionality credentials. Newsom has a track record of appointing LGBT candidates.

I don’t know about putting much stock in the state of residence. It feels more like a tan-suit situation, where any pick gets mined for political points. Also, I liked Silver Springs when I lived there.

@The_Nybbler is right that nonviability has taken on a perverse importance. Newsom is on record avoiding any of the candidates for next year’s election. In a functioning system, that would rule out all the best options. Since this is California, though, who can say?

So, were you in Newsom’s unenviable shoes, who’d you have picked?

Probably Karen Bass, if she wanted it. I still get the Black Woman points, but also select someone that has a more impressive political resume; there's at least a veneer of it not just being a national political favor.

If she didn't want it and I really wanted to pick someone that has zero chance of winning in 2024, I would not be inclined to have made the affirmative action promise in the first place. If you're Newsome, you don't actually have to go around promising things to black women all the time. Who else? I don't know California politics well enough to say, but I'd wager I could find a Latino guy or an Asian lady or even a white dude that actually lives in California, is sufficiently progressive to be a legitimate choice for the state. It's a big state! I don't know, grab the secretary of transportation and plug them in for a year, I'm sure they'll vote D and they don't have the ugliness of this selection. Here, grab this lady, I'm sure she's fine.

But really, I think the whole point is that Newsom is doing patronage politics because he's an effective politician, as where I'm a nobody that's viscerally offended by handing things out based on race and money. Newsom seems like he's angling for a 2028 run and securing things like donor money and national black support are smart moves. This is why he's going to be the Blue Caesar and I'm still going to be whining that it sucks that we have a Senator that was selected in this fashion.

I think the appointment effectively accomplishes Newsom's two goals of appointing someone who (1) will be a reliable Dem vote in the Senate and (2) has a low chance of winning re-election in 2024. I'm sure there are plenty of prominent California Democratic party politicians Newsom could appoint, but is concerned about how many of them could finagle that into re-election. His stated goal is to not decide the 2024 race with this appointment. I think appointing a relatively unknown outsider does this effectively.

She's also a lesbian

She's being selected to represent the median voter in California, not you. Given the prominence of abortion issues these days, being the president of EMILY's list is a pretty great qualification for that! Also taking into account the issue pointed out here, she seems like a pretty great choice overall.

If there was a vacancy in Alabama instead, I could imagine myself making a similar rant about the possible literal creationist the Governor there might appoint---there's nothing more to it than not liking representatives from parts of the country with prevailing political views far from your own.

She's being selected to represent the median voter in California, not you.

No, she's being selected to represent the median Democratic voter, or even the median Democratic activist/fund raiser.

Despite California's reputation for being on the loony left, that characterization is more about the political class than it is about the increasingly Hispanic population. 57% of Californian's are pro-choice with 38% believing that abortion should be illegal.

Few will have views as extreme as an abortion activist.

You are are correct that in Alabama, a vacancy would likely be appointed by someone equally on the right, but let's not pretend this represents an average voter in any way.

If a governmor is going to making an appointment where people don't get to vote, one would hope for a more conciliatory choice, even if we would never expect it from Newsom. Using race and gender as the overriding factors feels icky to me as well.

Using race and gender as the overriding factors feels icky to me as well.

Shouldn't it feel icky? It's open racism and sexism, no different than the old days of "XXX need not apply" job postings. Not to mention it would literally be illegal for a private company to hire this way. What's weird to me is that Dem elites are so immersed in identity politics that this doesn't feel icky to any of them.

Doesn't really feel icky to me. The selection criteria for the appointment seems to be a reliable and unelectable Dem to keep the seat warm until the next election.

If you can do that and appoint a diverse candidate that will please part of your base, seems like a win-win.

Huh? The primary selection criterion, stated clearly and up front by Newsom, was "is a black woman". All other considerations, including the unobjectionable non-icky one you just changed the subject to, were secondary.

The primary selection criterion

Unless you think there is any chance he would have picked a Republican black woman, I think it's highly likely the primary selection criteria is "being a Democrat", whether being black or a woman ranks above being reliable or not being too powerful, or not having already announced they would run for the full seat is probably debatable, but it's not going to have outweighed political affiliation.

Do you think in a world where his choice was between a politically unreliable black woman who might run for election, or a non-descript white guy who wouldn't rock the boat, he would still choose the former? I don't.

The pool of "warm reliable bodies" is large enough where he can choose whatever arbitrary conditions he wants to score some political points.

So, I guess your argument is that it doesn't feel icky because you claim he's lying when he says he's doing the icky thing, and his hidden motivation is more practical (and, well, moral)? That's still beside the point - the fact that Dems are completely fine with announcing a racist appointment is the problem, not the 4D chess Newsom might be playing.

Also, I actually do think Newsom would have chosen somebody completely unsuitable, with the right characteristics, if he'd had to. We've seen a string of skin-colour-and-genital based appointments already from the Dems, from Karine Jean-Pierre to Ketanji Brown Jackson to Kamala Harris herself. I'm sure there are more, but I don't pay that much attention. It would be coincidental if all these people, selected from a favoured 6% of the population, really were the best choices. It really does seem like this is just what you have to do to play ball on the Democrat side.

I think I stated three objections, in bullet points, that are not mere policy disagreements. I expect California's governor to select a senator that wouldn't be to my liking, but I would have generally expected him to select one that lives in California, to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, and to pick someone that had some career history other than attracting and dispensing patronage dollars. Likewise, I would expect Alabama to select someone far to my right and quite religious, but I wouldn't expect them to pick someone that lives in the Dakotas and inform everyone that isn't a white man that this is specifically a White Man seat.

By the by, Latinos hate the use of the x suffix. If you're looking to speak on their behalf, you'd best start with not using a meme that is essentially an implicit attack on their language.

Even some of the progressives have picked up on this, and are moving to "Latine", which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Unless you speak Spanish, in which case it still sounds stupid.

I mean, come on, English already has ‘Latin’ and ‘Hispanic’ as a gender neutral term. Inventing much dumber ones is, well, dumb.

It still sounds less stupid than any attempt at pronouncing "Latinx" in either language.

Latine would be the correct gender-neutral Spanish form, if Spanish-speaking culture cared about being gender neutral. So I don't think it sounds stupid in Spanish, just like a word only a politically correct person would use. In much the same way that "African-American" is a perfectly cromulent English word, but the group it refers to mostly prefer "Black".

Spanish doesn’t have a gender neutral form that wasn’t made up 30 seconds ago, and most -e words are masculine anyways(what would be the article, anyways? Le is already taken, it’s a masculine objective form).

Hopefully it's pronounced differently than "latrine".

My framing above is intended to indicated how I would expect the governor of California to behave, which would include use of the term "Latinx".

It is an attack, an awkward one at that, but fully deserved. Grammatical gender is a dumb feature and I will fight the whole of the world West of the Urals and South of the Himalayas on that point. At least English somehow managed to have some positive changes to it during the middle period even with the Normans doing their best to make things worse.

to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role

Latins are way below blacks on the oppression hierarchy, though, and most of the qualified Latinos are quite light skinned and prone to going off the reservation(remember, affirmative action hires aren’t Shaniqua either- these are PMC black women immersed in democratic patronage and have more in common with their white coworkers than with the hood granny from last weeks thread).

have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, an

The last time Newsom appointed a Senator, to a de facto permanent seat, no less, rather thana de facto 15 month gig, he appointed Alex Padilla, a Latino.

The three objections you list seem to be about par for the course for senator badness. I could list five that are equally objectionable about one of the current senators from Alabama, but I'm not sure simply listing flaws of ideological opponents is a productive way to discuss anything. It's a bit too close to making isolated demands for rigor.

The point is that Butler's pros as pointed out by many other commentators outweigh the specific cons you listed for the sort of voters whose opinion matters to Newsom even though they may not do so for you. This is the exact sort of thing thing I would say to myself about Tuberville or Trump.

First, I am going to be very interested to hear why the mods are not telling you "move this to the Sunday question thread".

Second, if she's living and working in California, why is she still registered to vote in Maryland? Family home is back there? Legal address? Tax reasons?

  • -14

I don't have a question, I don't think it's small-scale, I included information that many people wouldn't be likely to know, and I think I articulated a position. Maybe you think it's a stupid position, or so thin that it isn't worth discussing, but I have no idea how it would be a better fit for the Sunday thread.

It's the whole "we don't moderate on length" bit that is chafing me. You basically are asking questions along the same line I was, but you phrased them at greater length. So why aren't you told "go to the Sunday questions thread, this isn't culture war material"?

I'm a little annoyed, but not hugely; at least you're raising questions that are provoking discussion that is giving me the kind of information I wanted in the first place. I'm stubborn enough to not let this go, however, even if it ends up hurting me. Because it honestly does seem, despite protests to the contrary, "stick in enough padding and it's okay".

The extra parts aren't padding, they're a functional element of a good post.

  • Facts provide background which helps outsiders (like me, on this topic) understand what is happening and why it is important.
  • Commentary is the meat of a comment thread, as we are here for discussion. Commentary in a top level comment provides a kickstart to the discussion and focuses it in one direction.
  • Questions are a poor-man's replacement for facts, and the "focus" half of commentary.

Comparing the two posts, I see:

Your post:

  • Facts:
    • Dianne Feinstein's death
  • Commentary:
    • N/A (implicit only)
  • Questions:
    • How do civics work?
    • What will they decide?
    • etc?

This one:

  • Facts:
    • Diane Feinstein having died
    • Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like
    • promised...black women.
    • Maryland resident Laphonza Butler
    • qualifications (quoted/linked)
  • Commentary
    • win for patronage
    • rarely see so blatantly
    • all rather offensive
    • transient grifter
  • Questions:
    • N/A (implicit only)

They aren't similar at all by my framework.

I like your contributions despite normally disagreeing, but I think you're off-base here and being (perhaps unintentionally) rude to OP.

The OP provided helpful background information, stated and backed up his position, and provides a good jumping off point for further discussion.

Doing this adds length to the post, yes. But adding an engine to a car and adding a steel block is materially different despite them both increasing the weight.

Just as an FYI, I'm not familiar with the moderation history you're irritated with, which is why my answer above is very literal rather than addressing any comparison. For what it's worth, I didn't wake up this morning and think I was replicating something with padding. I saw the story, thought, "wow, that's absurd, California politics are even more corrupt than I'd expect" and wrote accordingly.

I'm a little annoyed, but not hugely; at least you're raising questions that are provoking discussion that is giving me the kind of information I wanted in the first place. I'm stubborn enough to not let this go, however, even if it ends up hurting me. Because it honestly does seem, despite protests to the contrary, "stick in enough padding and it's okay".

I don't think the mods have disagreed with this. The idea is that the padding is a decent enough proxy for quality that it stands. I don't have an issue with it at all.

This post is fine, and if your post had put in half this effort it would have been fine too.

Why would this get moved to Sunday questions?

Because it's not Culture War, or that's what I was told about asking who was likely to succeed Feinstein.

The mod note was: Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.

So it wasn't because it was not Culture War, but because it was low effort surely?

Because it's not Culture War

It is rife with culture war topics.

Where were you told this?

We had a confusing back and forth conversation in my inbox. I dislike having conversations there unless someone provides a lot of context. But I'd just banned them, so its not like they could have the conversation publicly on the relevant post.

His post wasn't banned for culture war reasons, but it certainly fits as a culture war topic. I told them that the public mod note is why they were banned, which is what SSCReader repeated above:

The mod note was: Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.

I was just being polite, tbh. I saw the conversation, but wanted to confirm he wasn't referring to some possible post I missed. I totally supported what you said back there.

No worries, I saw this and just wanted to clear up the confusion that could happen if only parts of our conversation are relayed.

Glenn Greenwald has written up a good Twitter thread on the EU's proposed new draconian censorship laws. The pretext is that Slovakia's recent election resulted in a guy who has promised to end all Ukraine aid to end up winning it. This is all apparently due to "misinformation". Clearly when the voters have the wrong viewpoints, they must be treated with extra doses of correct thinking and anyone who deviates from it should summarily be punished. The law itself moves the onus onto the social media companies.

So if you think the era of censorship is over, think again. It's not just the EU. The Canadian parliament is also preparing something similar.

The most banal observation is that a system that is confident in its own survival does not need repression. The obvious implication is that the people running the system are not confident in their grip on power and in Europe in particular the big structural trend will be ever-increasing illegal migration once the Ukraine war passes. I suspect this censorship law will be used vigorously to deplatform anyone critical of the loose border policies the EU is promoting.

It's funny because we've long read about people in repressive societies like Iran, Turkey or China using VPN services to get around censorship by the regime. Might we get something similar in Europe in the not-too-distant future? I should add that I am not too pessimistic. People have tasted (relative) freedom and will not go back to the old regime. The rise of alternatives like Rumble is directly linked to increasing political repression on YouTube. Even outright totalitarian systems like the Soviet Union did not succeed in brainwashing their population. I've always felt that Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of cheap entertainment to distract the masses was a better analogy to the Western elite's preferred methods of control over the more stereotypical 1984 vision that Orwell laid out. But clearly there are limits to how much you can distract people and now the gloves are coming off.

The strangest thing to me in that thread is how they talk about "misinformation" like it it's a virus that can be prevented, treated, or even eradicated instead people just disagreeing with them.

Though one may disagree with antipsychiatry as a movement, Szasz's conception of the therapeutic state perfectly describes the operation and justification of modern managerial institutions fighting misinformation, COVID, climate change and any and all other manifestations of the devil.

the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion. Faced with the problem of "madness", Western individualism proved to be ill-prepared to defend the rights of the individual: modern man has no more right to be a madman than medieval man had a right to be a heretic because if once people agree that they have identified the one true God, or Good, it brings about that they have to guard members and nonmembers of the group from the temptation to worship false gods or goods. A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason – that is, madness.

Ty for the link! I've been grasping towards a similar theory myself, exciting to see it laid out so clearly over 60 years ago. Medicalism and Safetyism, to me, are the hidden levers by which the progressive movement has gained so much power. Especially when it comes to pushing rhetoric in one on one, informal conversations. It's extremely difficult to argue with someone who is convinced that you are mentally ill for your stated positions.

Kind of like those shows where a healthy person is put in a mental institution. No matter what you say, it doesn't matter. You're stuck in the category with no way out.

Might we get something similar in Europe in the not-too-distant future?

Try the past and the present. If you're an activist for, among other things, curtailing immigration, you are very explicitly persecuted and hiding your identity online can help you keep a job, a normal life, and the right to travel. And if you're actually a racist you should do so to protect yourself from fines, imprisonment and violence from activists of the other side.

Don't get me wrong, this is quite different from straight up being disappeared and/or executed if you involve yourself with politics outside of the one allowed party, but this is a difference in tactics, not in goal or intensity. I've seen heretics bullied to misery and suicide on our own enlightened continent.

My growing cynicism has been floating the proposition that it was always so, that dissidents were always silenced, but memories of the 90s and actual evidence of how open and unafraid people were to speak their minds and have even deeply heterodox beliefs openly in those days make me reject it.

I do think you're right that there's a trend. You used to get ignored, scoffed at and mocked. Now there is an increasing move toward hard managerialism and actively destroying the lives of dissidents.

As I've discussed here previously with our resident blackpillers, I see this as a good sign, because it is a sign of weakness. Whilst they see this as a bad sign, because it is a sign that the regime no longer has to care about appearances. You be the judge. But I don't recommend staying in the EU if freedom is your most core value.

As a resident Slovak here I can say that as usual there is conflation of true and false statements in there. As a quick rundown, the current election followed years of political instability of Slovak government that I think was led by genuinely mentally ill person in form of former prime minister. The period was marked by chaos and incompetence, paradoxically the last year we basically had so called "bureaucratic government" that had limited powers but provided more stability all around. As a result the parties that participated in that government fell precipitously and 4 out of 7 parties now in parliament were extraparliamentary or even nonexistent during last election - we are talking about 81 out of 150 seats belonging to these parties.

Nevertheless the election revolved around the person of Robert Fico, who is seen as Orban-like person except he is more malleable in his views and he changed his rhetoric several times in order to gather more votes. On the other side of the isle there was a lot of drama, we have a progressive party literally called Progressive Slovakia (PS) who ended up second in the election. This is the darling of the media, they are pushing the usual CW stuff one would expect, they literally have part of the program called "Equity" where they push for things like free contraception in pharmacies including for teenagers, trans identity (including government IDs) based on self-determination without any medical paper and so forth. They also have a lot of activists including people from Greenpeace in their party and so forth.

Now a lot of the "disinformation" claims revolved around tone policing and language policing of these facts. It is the usual stuff one saw for years everywhere, where you pick the most uncharitable argument against PS policies and at the same time take the most Motte-type reading of their proposition and explain how opponents only spread disinformation as PS only wants human rights or whatever. Of course the same benefit of doubt is not afforded to the other side: one of the most discussed moments of the campaign was when the chairman of Christian Democratic Party was asked what is worse in his eyes: LGBT or corruption. And he answered that "both are scourge" later in the same interview explaining that he meant not LGBT people but "LGBT ideology". Of course all respected newspapers and media selected that one sentence and claimed that he is homophobe who spreads hate against gays (no peep on T part of LGBT of course, people in Slovakia are not generally that keen on trans stuff). On rare occasions where the other part of the question was cited (about LGBT ideology) it was explained that "LGBT ideology does not exist" and it has to be hate against Gays and Lesbians. So again, you can literally insert into mouth of what somebody else is saying by defining words he says in your way. And this misinformation is claimed as protecting against misinformation.

Now also to be frank, there was a lot of very nasty parts of the campaign. There were private messages of politicians openly talked about by former prime minister where he claimed he got it from "somebody he will not name". You had open war where mistresses of other politicians also shared his private messages and it probably caused him to lose (I think deservedly). There were outright usual hoaxes on social media how this party wants to lower pensions etc. But in general the hardcore "disinformation sphere" represented by pro-Putin social media celebrities as represented by the party "Republic" failed, they had sub 5% result which put them outside of parliament despite having more than 10% in many of pre-election polls. The party of former prime minister now also faces accusation of buying votes from poor Villages as they have 90%+ results in places that are basically racially segregated Roma people. That one I think carries a lot of water, there is a practice where you can take votes of other parties except for party you are supposed to throw in and sell them for cash, it happened in the past in some of the places. But again this fraud is tied not to Fico but to his most vocal opponent, so there is that.

Anyway, long story short I think this is now a regular thing to accuse opponent of doing something you yourself are doing - using misinformation to accuse somebody of doing misinformation and then fighting against this percieved threat. If the other side reacts in some stupid way (e.g. saying that LGBT is scourge) then this is perfect, you can now say that you are only reacting and defending when going full force.

As I understand it, the recently concluded €50 billion aid package for Ukraine that was voted through the EU parliament needs unanimous consent from all governments and the election of someone like Fico obviously raises the specter of that aid package either not being approved or at least watered down significantly. It is no secret that many larger EU countries (e.g. Germany) want to change this rule of unanimous consent into a qualified majority, which would allow them to steamroll smaller countries like Slovakia.

Until that changes, however, the voice of the smallest countries still matter greatly which is why whoever controls the governments of those countries in turn also matters. Hence the censorship law, which would help put the thumbs on the scale.

It is a little bit more complicated. While Robert Fico won the election, his party got 42 seats. Together with Slovak National Party (SNS) who is also pro-Putin and "anti-war" who got 10 seats he only got 52 seats. He requires at least 76 seats but more realistically 80+ in order for his government to be stable. The issue with SNS party is that there is only one person who actually is a member of the party, the rest were internet celebrities who got enough personal votes to get into parliament. It is hard to see how SNS will be unified platform with so many idiosyncratic people in there to put it mildly.

Nevertheless Fico needs another party into the government, the Hlas party created in 2020 by former Smer (Fico's party) member, one Peter Pellegrini. Despite his party only having 27 seats, Pellegrini is now the kingmaker between Fico and anti-Fico bloc led by Progressive Slovakia. Pellegrini now positioned himself as he is in the middle of this conflict, playing potentially for both sides. However he is not only kingmaker, he requires that he himself will be prime minister despite his party having third largest number of seats. And the thing is, that Pellegrini wants to be viewed as a "standard politician" not pro-Putin but also not pro LGBT in order to keep his image. So I doubt that any government with him in it (which is basically 99% chance at this point) will change the stance too much.

Also just as an afterthought, I have to rant a little bit. Fuck Ukrainian government for their immense stupidity - and I am talking as somebody who supports the Ukrainians financially and who is not squeamish to buy guns by my personal donations. Literally days before the election in both Slovakia and Poland, Ukrainians decided that it is a good time to sue both countries for agricultural export/import issue. Of course this was picked up by all anti-Ukrainian parties where now they were the protectors of small farmers against Ukrainians and so forth. What a misstep - the glorification of the literal SS-man in Canada was also played on social media. So what I am saying is that there was no need for disinformation, all that was needed was for people to put together real compilations of how Ukrainians mean harm to Slovakia and how members of PS want to trans your kids and so forth. Who needs disinformation if information is damning enough.

So if you think the era of censorship is over, think again. It's not just the EU. The Canadian parliament is also preparing something similar.

No, it isn't - the actual reason they're doing this is much dumber, and something that all parties have promoted for years.

Canadian media is required to have a certain level of exposure to Canadian content, lest we become fully Americanized. That's why the Classic Rock stations in Windsor plays way more Rush than the station in Detroit.

I agree that it is stupid for a government bureaucrat to say to your podcast network "Why aren't you doing any true crime stories aboot Toronto murders eh?", but I do not believe it is "censorship", nor does it have anything to do with "disinformation".

Americans cannot fathom this, because it's extremely silly, and nobody would ever have to make an American radio station play The Eagles - Americans come with patriotism pre-installed.

Americans cannot fathom this, because it's extremely silly, and nobody would ever have to make an American radio station play The Eagles - Americans come with patriotism pre-installed.

Hah, American patriotism is actually at an all-time low from what I've read. Then again, most of the world culture is basically just recycled American culture so we don't need to worry. It's good to be on top.

Then again, most of the world culture is basically just recycled American culture so we don't need to worry. It's good to be on top.

Stop raiding the rest of the world for Netflix adaptions then.

repressive societies like Iran, Turkey or China using VPN services to get around censorship by the regime

Huh that stuff is in the past now. Social media companies operating in Turkey has to have Turkish offices now and they are liable for fines if they don't comply with government orders on removing content. VPN is not going to save you if the website itself is removing the content.

I actually agree with them that this is “misinformation”.

And the war goals have been closer to this https://twitter.com/thestudyofwar/status/1708897470158160151?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

But the powers that be are going in a direction far worse with censorship. Yes the regime is not secure. I don’t understand Europes immigration policies at all. The regime has a lot of bad policy.

“Misinformation” can mean anything. Sometimes the regime is in a position that I believe is correct Sbf sometimes wrong but disagreeing is always misinformation.

The problem with the current discussion around “misinformation” is that it explicitly couches disagreement with the narrative as misinformation. Even if Putin wants a peace deal, it doesn’t follow that anyone who comes to a similar conclusion is falling for misinformation. In most contexts as it’s actually used, it’s much more accurate to replace misinformation with crime-think as it’s basically come to mean nothing more or less than disagreement with the regime.

There are plenty of good reasons to be reluctant to back Ukraine. The war is effectively at stalemate, there aren’t any large swathes of territory changing hands. Putin might well consider nukes if he’s backed into a corner or fears losing power. There the cost involved and that money not being available to cover all kinds of pressing domestic problems (and the resulting loss of social trust may be just as bad if not worse. Consider how residents of Maui feel about watching billions lavished on Ukraine and getting little help themselves). There’s Taiwan as well, which is, at least to me a much bigger strategic issue because of chip manufacturing that they do and no one else does.

There are reasons to stay. But to me, suggesting that only those who have fallen for misinformation have issues with continuing blank check support for Ukraine is really not an argument as the internet says. It’s simply a smear against any dissidents who aren’t toeing the line and happily munching chicken Kyiv.

In this case I think misinformation is appropriately used though it’s tough. Because I don’t see any offer of a peace deal. If there was evidence that you could do a ceasefire at todays lines then it would not be misinformation. Sure the war is at a stalemate but where is the evidence that if Ukraine quit fighting Russia would agree to quit fighting (along with a Korea style border). None.

If you said allow Russia the whole of Ukraine and take peace that would be accurate information and an honest opinion.

The one thing I’ve been thinking about is Europe should be footing nearly the full bill for this war. It really isn’t Americas job to protect Europe at least as the first line of defense. Germany and France should be paying full freight.

I think it's a bit easy to say there's no evidence negotiation would work when it's not really been attempted at all.

Maybe Putin just thinks he can outlast Ukrainian manpower and wouldn't bite now but it's hard to say when the best offer he's been given is to give back everything Crimea included.

Nobody has been seriously talking about peace since Minsk and as the Germans blabbered even that wasn't really serious.

Has Putin made an offer? Your giving no agency to him.

The defending side literally doesn’t have agency to end the war. Only the invader can offer peace.

There were reports of peace talks that were close shortly after hostilities began but it was reported that Boris Johnson quashed it.

Also defending side clearly has agency. They can sue for peace but it may not be on terms they like.

In the early stages of the war, Putin wasn't interested in negotiating with Ukraine - he said that Ukraine was a NATO puppet and that he wanted to negotiate with the organ grinder rather than the monkey.

Putin's eve-of-war demands were not even within Ukraine's control to give - they were a commitment from NATO never to admit Ukraine, and a withdrawal of NATO troops from Eastern Europe.

I don't disagree with you there. Though we're not privy to all details of course.

I believe he floated a DMZ solution before the counteroffensive, but that's certainly too vague to count.

Maybe America should have thought of that before building NATO, an alliance that explicitly commits the United States to protect European nations.

Sometimes the regime is in a position that I believe is correct Sbf sometimes wrong but disagreeing is always misinformation.

Could you please spend more time writing your posts? I have no idea what this sentence means or who you're referring to, and your incredibly frequent comments are full of basic grammar errors and typos that waste the time of people trying to interact with you. What does Sam Bankman Fried have to do with any of this?

It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.

For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

I have myself hitchhiked and volunteered extensively around Israeli territories around Gaza and also inside the West Bank. I know plenty of people who were in serious harms way today and also will likely be even more in the coming months. Both Jews who will be called up to the army and also Arabs who will have to endure Israeli operations which, while not totally indiscriminate, do not care that much about civilian casualties in all honesty. I am mentioning this so I can be forgiven for being a bit ranty and incoherent. I have been feeling very disturbed the whole day and doom scrolling increasingly grim videos.

Israeli military and zionists in general have an obvious incentive to always portrait Mossad and IDF as omnipotent forces who are aware and capable of everything. Israel's enemies also have such an incentive because they keep catastrophically failing to beat Israel and they need to explain this situation somehow without acknowledging their own absolute incompetence.

However in reality we are talking about a country of 6 million people, surrounded by hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs and constantly engaged in the very time/resource constraining task of subjugating a local Arab population about their own Jewish population. Israeli Jews have some very exploitable weaknesses such as an incredibly polarized society comprised of groups who can't even agree why the country exists, high dependance on their diaspora's (diminishing) influence over Western states, absolutely no strategic depth in case of a real invasion and averseness to casualties/POWs from the conscript army (literal 18 year old boys and girls). Most importantly, Israel only has to fail once at defending itself and it will no longer exist. Arabs have the luxury of constant new attempts (as long as they keep up the population pyramid).

I am going to dismiss the more conspiracy-minded explanations of how Israeli security apparatus could allow such a thing to happen. We are talking about a small country, ran by a very small group of people who have missed even worse signs of incoming attack in the past and also had been involved in a bitter internal conflict for most of the year. So if you expect Israel to turn on God mode and destroy its enemies, perhaps take into account that the same people couldn't prevent this from happening in the first place. They are clearly not that omnipotent. Hamas has likely captured a very high number of prisoners. Many of them are female and even children. In the past the pressure on the Israeli government has been immense in such situations. We might see some very nasty breakdowns in Israeli population and politics if Hamas starts exchanging the prisoners' lives and bodies for IDF's behavior.

Also, Israel hasn't really been that successful in the recent memory at actually occupying aggressive militant controlled areas (Lebanon and Gaza, in the West Bank they have mutual interests with the PA elites so pacification is easier). A ground incursion into Gaza will be an extremely bloody affair for both sides. It has a high chance of serious failure.

Another factor Netanyahu will have to consider is his goal of rapprochement between Israel and a bunch of more despotic and American aligned Arab countries. A bloody ground war and occupation would kill such goals for many years to come. Even the most insulated Arab leaders have to somewhat consider the fact that their populations absolutely HATE Israel and Jews in general. Even in the best invasion scenarios, for IDF there will be endless atrocious videos of Arab civilians massacred.

If the escalation continues, I think the Israeli politics will change beyond recognition in the near future. For some decades now the OG-European-Labour-Zionist-Secular elite of the country totally lost its grasp on democratic majorities but have been holding on to power through risky political shenanigans. Their preferred approach to the Arab problem has clearly failed. While they were in no way bastions of humanism towards Arabs, these people still represented much more Western instincts about what is acceptable to do against your enemy. At least they were careful that when they felt atrocities were necessary, they worked well on the Western PR. Things might get much uglier very fast in the near term.

Rant out.

Thank you for your very interesting and informative post, it's a shame that we're yet again in a position with not a lot of information and little idea about how things are going to play out over the short term. We don't even know if the situation is going to escalate or dampen down, it's simply too early to say at this point. What I am concerned with is the potential to have another 'Austrian Duke' style issue whereby one side feels compelled to act in a harsh way and the other side is compelled to respond. Information is a critical component, that's the difference between a 'Tigray' style Ethiopian ethnic cleansing and the Ukrainian resistance. The difference between the two is that Ukraine got their message out whilst the Tigray were under radio silence and the world simply didn't pay attention to what might have been going on. It's going to be extremely difficult to be a moderate in Isreal if the early reports of massive casualties are true as modern social media has the power to create incredibly evocative content that can be shared wildly quickly amongst people with little in the way of infrastructure to restrict or censor it.

Yonah Jeremy Bob, a military analyst for the Jerusalem Post, says Israel is likely planning a major ground assault into Gaza – the biggest since the 2014 invasion.

“There’s going to be a second act and that is an invasion of Gaza, and I think larger than 2014 when Israel called up 80,000 reserves. Israeli has four divisions of reservists that it is already calling up and has moved 35 brigades to the border. So what Israel had a 6:30am this morning [when the Hamas attack began] was minuscule to what it has now. Within a day or two, Israeli will have a massive force that will be able to overwhelm Hamas forces in Gaza,” Bob told Al Jazeera.

“What the question will really be is how far they want to go? Does it want to topple Hamas and have to figure out being in control, or handing control over to the Palestinian Authority, or a multinational force and all the consequences that could have?”

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/7/israel-palestine-escalation-live-news-barrage-of-rockets-fired-from-gaza

I can't imagine Israel demanding anything less than a complete destruction and removal of Hamas from the Gaza strip. The issue with this isn't with justification for doing so, but how far they will go in the attempt. Whilst Israel may be short on manpower they can certainly make up for it with munitions. I've been following the Ukrainian war and it has really shown off the power of drones as both tools of surveillance and recon as well as acting as weapons themselves. For every suicide bomber they have to deal with, Israel has hundreds to tens of thousands of suicide drones to send back the opposite way. As the casualties mount up on the Palestinian side it will increase pressure on other Arab countries and potentially China a justification to intervene into this matter and up the escalation ladder we go. It's still too early to tell, but I have a strong feeling this is going to turn into a 'shit-show' pretty darn quickly.

I have long feared the use of drones as a tool of genocide. My mental image of it was of a person in Nairobi Kenya sitting behind a large high definition computer screen sipping diet coke whilst blowing up 'insurgents' in Afghanistan. The issue with the corresponding rise of artificial domain (wrong word?) intelligence is that you no longer need that person 'in the loop'. It combines the immediate deadliness of bullets and shrapnel with the emotional/moral distance of proxy methods such as hunger and displacement to achieve their ends. I hope I am right that this current potential conflict is a little too soon for talk of the worst outcomes of the adoption of drones/AI, but this still represents a complete shift in the balance of terror for States fighting insurgency/guerilla adversaries.

For every suicide bomber they have to deal with, Israel has hundreds to tens of thousands of suicide drones to send back the opposite way

Suicide drones are useful when you face anti-air assets and cannot risk planes and pilots for precision strikes. Israeli jets have always had free rein over Gaza and they can annihilate anywhere at will at any time. The limiting factor has always been the extremely high civilian casualties caused by this approach since Hamas is totally embedded into the civilian population. Also Hamas will be using its prisoners as human shields for the foreseeable future. There are already photos of prisoners being put in the tunnels to discourage Israeli bunker busters. Drones will not change this equation.

I have long feared the use of drones as a tool of genocide.

The thing holding a genocide of Palestinians back isn't a lack of tools. It is (geo)politics. Intervention from the Arab states, West, Russia, Iran etc.

There are no new strategic options today that didn’t exist yesterday. That has always been the problem. Egypt doesn’t want Gaza for obvious reasons. An occupation would be unimaginably bloody, expensive, permanent and occupy a huge amount of the IDF’s attention when there are other threats to the north.

They can’t trade for the hostages because I can’t imagine the public will support them doing so now. Hamas will demand every single relevant prisoner Israel has, and that’s not politically viable and would be extremely stupid from a security perspective. They’ll have to go in, eat the casualties, and accept the inevitably brutal videos and pictures of the resulting civilian deaths.

KSA will performatively pull out of negotiations (exactly as Iran wants, presumably) but will continue dealing with Israel behind the scenes. Maybe Biden can offer more help in Yemen to save some face but the situation there is complex and it’s unlikely. The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza, as well as the entire political leadership, mercilessly but quickly and professionally. But then again, I’m a Zionist.

The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza, as well as the entire political leadership, mercilessly but quickly and professionally. But then again, I’m a Zionist.

While I appreciate this candor and show of true colors from a Zionist, it's incredibly unsettling to hear the casual avocation of genocide. I can't see this happening in this day and age though, not with cameras in every persons pocket and social media. I would hope that if Israel would do something like this, it would spark it's neighbors and Muslims around the world into a great Jihad.

Killing 30,000 people out of 2 million is not genocide. As for cameras, I understand Hamas has them, and has been publishing their own atrocities.

Killing 30,000 people out of 2 million is not genocide

What was described above would be.

I agree that it won’t happen for various reasons.

The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza

Not sure this would be worth it for Israel in the long run. I think it would cause a diminishment in foreign support for Israel and would also likely cause many of the more liberal kind of Israelis, including many of its brightest minds, to leave the country.

Summary executions for prophylactic purposes aren't exactly going to endear one to the international community. I'm generally pro-Israel but if that happened I'd have to concede to my tankie friends that yep, they were right all along, Israel sucks. I suspect most politicians with the exception of some on the American right would agree with me, and Israel would lose whatever special status it has in the international community, if not become an outright pariah state. Next you'll have rocket attacks coming from the West Bank with Jordanian support, and the West won't be there to force them to Lebanon, or Tunis, or wherever.

I think Israel has been remarkably restrained since the mid-90s, and I’d like to see technological superiority used to kill at least a substantial number of violent young men. Retaliation would be limited, and in any case could be met by more destruction. Having been radicalized by the footage from today, I don’t consider these people’s lives to have substantial value.

Israel has been restrained because it is indeed fighting for the subjugation of a population with a size equivalent to its own. The alternative to restraint is not killing "at least a substantial number of violent young men", it is genocide. The definition of "violent young men who might take up arms against Israel if provoked enough" is "99% of Palestinian men". In a society like Palestinians intentionally or unintentionally killing someone is enough to convince a dozen of their male relatives to swear an eternal oath of revenge against you and genuinely pursue this.

I generally sympathize with Israel much more than Arabs instinctively because I perceive them as civilized people dealing with barbarians (a specific type of Islamic barbarity that I personally have reasons to specifically hate). If Israelis become another tribe of barbarians engaged in genocidal clan war then I simply do not care.

Thanks. I think you raise a very important point, which is that there is no such thing as partial humiliation. There is only absolute, total humiliation and total conciliation. Given that the latter is obviously politically impossible with regards to Palestinians, the former - which I agree is a poor option - is the only option.

Drone production, heavily automated surveillance including via facial recognition, all these things can, as Dase said earlier, make effective repression easier. I think it possible.

Drone production, heavily automated surveillance including via facial recognition, all these things can, as Dase said earlier, make effective repression easier. I think it possible.

Yes there is serious potential in this direction. It is not even unique to the Israel/Palestine conflict situation. This might become the testing grounds for a new type of government model for this century where AI developments drones and digitalization makes it viable to implement a degree of totalitarian control over human populations never seen before in human history.

I sense a hidden enthusiasm among some posters here for such a future for Palestinians. I hope they realize that their own governments won't shy away from imposing it on them in a couple decades either.

While people here have some outside-the-overton views, a lot of the eg. problems with things like mass immigration and ‘justice reform’ policies could be solved by this kind of police state. My primary issue with modernity is anarcho-tyranny. A replacement with simple but effective CCP-tier tyranny would be acceptable, if not the best solution.

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Egypt doesn’t want Gaza for obvious reasons.

What happened to French Algerians in Algeria? Germans in Czechoslovakia? Germans in Poland? Germans in former Germany that then became Poland? Poles in former Poland that then became Ukraine? Or the other Palestinians who got kicked out by Israeli expansion? They absolutely can expel another couple million people by seizing their land, credibly threatening them with execution and kicking them out, it's within their power (provided the IDF gets their act together) and they've done it before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949%E2%80%931956_Palestinian_expulsions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Palestinian_exodus

As you suggest, this has been tried in the past. It led to incredible amounts of chaos in Jordan and Lebanon. In the Lebanese case Israel then had to try to go and invade the country they chased the Palestinians to and get bogged down in a massive fiasco. Jordan came very close to turning into a radical Arab republic due to the Palestinian groups, similar to Syria/Iraq/Egypt at the time and this would be a catastrophe for Israeli security.

All of these expulsions you mention were carried out by absolute victorious states of massive bloody wars which had almost omnipotent control over the expulsed populations. This is not the case here and likely never will. Arab states played a very bloody and cynical gambit after 1948 by not allowing Palestinian populations to be resettled in a proper manner inside their countries. But in the long term it has paid off and Israel now has to deal with an insurmountable problem that constantly threatens to break the country. Why would Egypt/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon now give up and just accept a population of infinitely more radicalized Palestinians?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_insurgency_in_South_Lebanon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September

Why would Egypt/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon now give up and just accept a population of infinitely more radicalized Palestinians?

US bribery. Aside from Syria, the US funds them to be friendly with Israel. US foreign aid to Egypt massively increased after they signed a peace agreement with Israel and has stayed high since.

Israel then had to try to go and invade the country they chased the Palestinians to

This is the path Israel chose. Territorial expansion is not without its costs, it makes a lot of people very unhappy if you come in and take their land.

What's the alternative, Israel returns to the former status quo of bombing Gaza every so often? Executing the fighting age men, as suggested above? I'm not confident that's a long-term, sustainable solution. They're hardly likely to engage in serious negotiations or stop building new settlements while they have a fawning superpower sponsor and their enemies don't.

What's the alternative

I don't know, it is certainly difficult to see one. In general I am a firm believer that making your very populous neighbor(s) hate you and basing your security arrangements around a distant superpower always favoring you is not a great idea overall (Israel is not unique in this regard, Russia's little neighbors also make this mistake). America might lose its power or interest at some point, but Arabs will always be right across the border. We have seen how much it freaked out Zionists when the US foreign policy establishment got the idea that perhaps normal relations with Iran is more beneficial to American Empire.

In general I am a firm believer that making your very populous neighbor(s) hate you and basing your security arrangements around a distant superpower always favoring you is not a great idea overall (Israel is not unique in this regard, Russia's little neighbors also make this mistake).

Note that Russia's little neighbors in general were already hated by Russia and trying to get some help from anyone else is preferable to getting better with Russia (which goes nowhere as Russia will invade you anyway once it will be judged as possible by Russia)

The only alternative was to not found Israel in the first place, but the alternatives there were probably worse too. Once it existed, radicalization was inevitable, there’s no world in which coexistence with Arabs was possible, it’s not like the Baltics or Ukraine where they could conceivably decide to join the Russian sphere and accept the consequences. At best it would simply be a return to the pre-1920 status quo of being at the mercy of a hostile, lower IQ foreign authority with zero leverage.

Once it existed, radicalization was inevitable

Probably yes. Perhaps if the first generation of Palestinian refugees in camps did not grow up in such horrible conditions with constant reminders of their humiliation, then things could have been different. My understanding is that they drove almost all of the radicalization in the conflict. But that is not entirely on Israel either. The hosting Arab states almost deliberately didn't allow the refugees to have normal lives and kept trying to use them as geopolitical chips..

What's the alternative, Israel returns to the former status quo of bombing Gaza every so often?

Returning to permanent occupation of Gaza, probably.

This is the path Israel chose. Territorial expansion is not without its costs, it makes a lot of people very unhappy if you come in and take their land.

What are you referring to?

Territorial expansion by Israel and progressive taking of Palestinian land.

What territorial expansion? Are you talking about Israeli settlements in the West Bank?

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French Algerians went back to France.Germans went to Germany. Poles went to Poland. There's nowhere for Palestinians to go, unless Israel really wants them in the West Bank. Moving them to another Arab state isn't an option—first, since Israel isn't wont to take advantage of strategic depth and starts building settlements on any territory they control, all this does is push the problem back geographically; instead of Hamas firing rockets from Gaza into Israel they're firing them from the Sinai into Gaza. More importantly, though, it pretty much closes the book on any rapprochement with additional Arab states. Since the last couple years of the Trump Administration, the US has been brokering deals between Israel and other Arab states in an attempt to undercut Iran's influence in the region. Driving Arabs out of Gaza and into Egypt would put those Arab states, whose populations are generally pro-Palestinian, into a situation where it would be difficult to move forward. There's already speculation that today's attacks were arranged by the Iranians for the express purpose of throwing a wrench into plans for Saudi recognition of Israel. A reaction such as you describe would only play into those schemes. Secretary Blinken is en route to Saudi Arabia as we speak to smooth over any problems these attacks may have caused. If the Israelis go the route you suggest then there's nothing he can say that will do that, not to mention that other states that already recognize Israel and are maybe even allies would find this course of action hard to swallow, the United States included. They'd diplomatically isolate themselves for short-term gain. I'm generally pro-Israel, but I'd seriously reconsider my support if they took this approach.

The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza, as well as the entire political leadership, mercilessly but quickly and professionally. But then again, I’m a Zionist.

Support that plan. Unfortunately the only way to deal with monsters is to show that you are the bigger monster and right now you are wearing a leash of your own making and won't it be wonderful if we are to put on both our leashes. Or else. Every Palestinian grunt and thug that has entered Israel today must die. Every part of the command chain that has approved - also. And the political leadership should be decapitated (figuratively, but literal is also acceptable). Then you go to the top survivor and ask nicely - you are now leader. Are you going to behave. If they refuse - shoot him and move to the one under him.

Given that there's a substantial portion of western societies that view Israel and the Jews as enemies, do you support them taking this approach to the Israelis or Jewish populations in their own country? You're already suggesting that Israel become "more of a monster", and this would dramatically shift the incentives and attitudes towards jewry in western countries.

I could see your approach working out if the Israelis were the biggest, meanest monster in the entire world... but right now I don't think that's the case. A return to bronze age mentality would absolutely not work out in Israel's favour - the USA, Russia and China are all bigger monsters than Israel after all. The biggest competition in that world would be the existing great powers deciding who gets to build a new Arch of Titus.

The entire reason Israel was created was in anticipation of the world becoming hostile to their Jewish populations. Bronze age mentality is what Israel is for.

If that's the case then you are making an argument for the immediate extermination of all Jewish people outside of Israel. If we're going back to Bronze age norms, AIPAC et al would simply just not exist in very short order. Why should the rest of the world press the co-operate button if Israel proudly announces that they are always going to pick defect every single time they can?

I'm not making an argument for it. I'm making an observation that the foundation of Israel is built on the belief that it will happen inevitably, like it or not.

To be honest, seeing the way crowds have rallied to cheer this sickening violence makes me think they might have been right.

First - no western society views Israel as enemy. Second - Israel as a state hasn't done any atrocities in Europe, doubful even to have hurt anyone. Crimes and other violence committed by Jews are extremely rare. There is no outlook this to change any time soon.

But to answer your question - if Israel tomorrow launches attack on Poland and starts killing and raping Poles - yes I am totally ok with firmly but politely pointing out to them that Aushwitz is perfectly preserved.

In a way - don't remember that Israel knows in it's literal blood and bones that we are the bigger monsters. And they didn't even provoked us Europeans.

For this situation - Israel has blank check from me to do anything needed to make sure Hamas can never hurt a jew again. If they become too jolly I may be against helping them. But I doubt that there is anything that IDF can do to make me be against Israel in the current situation.

First - no western society views Israel as enemy.

Officially no, but I read constant reports talking about the rise of antisemitism and I'm not even trying to be glib here - I can see antisemitic memes and rhetoric spreading among the general population in real and serious ways, and especially amongst the western political blocs that are in the ascendant and outside the establishment.

Second - Israel as a state hasn't done any atrocities in Europe, doubful even to have hurt anyone. Crimes and other violence committed by Jews are extremely rare. There is no outlook this to change any time soon.

The dissident right absolutely believes that Jews are responsible for a long list of problems in their lives/societies. Crimes and other violence committed by jews are extremely rare, but the crimes that do happen tend to be extremely prominent and serious - Madoff, Epstein, etc. Antisemitism is one of the few areas the dissident right could plausibly work with the anticolonial/pro-islamic immigration left on (in the sense that the various muslim populations living in the west are now big enough to have a political voice). I'm not in any way suggesting that this is the case right now, but I think that assuming this state of affairs will last forever is dangerous. Even if they don't go invade Poland, there are enough people talking about the USS Liberty on the internet these days that it might not matter too much.

The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza

Wouldn't executing childbearing age women instead of men be a better solution in the long term?

The aversion we have to executing women is once again an example of how the environment our intuitions developed in means that some of them are maladaptive in the modern world.

It absolutely makes more sense to execute the childbearing age women instead of fighting age men. The men you just need to hold in jails for 20 years after which they will age out of violence, however the women will continue pumping out more kids who eventually grow into either fighting age men or new childbearing age women who can then pump out more fighting age men and so on.

I think we have an aversion to executing such women (and I too have this aversion, my limbic system makes me feel a visceral repulsion to this that I don't feel towards executing fighting age men) because in the olden days the victors would take the women as spoils of war for themselves after executing the men, and doing so would allow the winning tribe to grow faster than it would do if it had just killed the women, hence favouring the development of a revulsion to killing women that isn't present for killing men. These days we rightfully frown on raping/taking as additional wives captured women and so this benefit to the winning society is no longer present, but the downsides are still there. Hence in the modern system it does make more sense long term strategically to eliminate the women (akin to economic damage through bombing factories in a war) more so than it does to eliminate the men (akin to killing enemy soldiers on the frontline).

However this line of thinking makes even me go "ick" deep down and I wouldn't want to see it happen at all. My estimation of Israel as a polity would go down a lot if they did something like this. Alas, I too am human, all too human...

That's some extraordinary biopolitics.

If Israel ever stoops that low and in a visible way (it won't), I'll at least get the pleasure of watching American Christians indignantly mutter something about justified retribution or whatever when I ask them why forced sterilization in Xinjiang by godless Chicoms is wrong but this isn't.

Male disposability uber alles; our hindbrains tell us that women are wonderful, innocent, and have inherent value.

Women can be easily integrated into a neutral absorbing tribe, such as Ukrainian women merrily living their best Tinder lives in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic.

This would perhaps only go double for a hostile conquering tribe. It’s been well-hypothesized that the female propensity for Stockholm Syndrome is an adaptation for better war-bride acclimation.

No coercion or rape even needed.

I believe there’s a 4Chan screenshot (a most rigorous citation) that pointed out, historically and prehistorically, women would see their boyfriends, husbands, brothers, fathers killed in war, but then shrug it off and have the children of the conquerors.

French women with German soldiers in WW2 could be an example.

such as Ukrainian women merrily living their best Tinder lives in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic.

It might be their pre-war wish, isn't an argument that integrating hostile Palestinian women would be easy.

Terrible optics. And they are hot. You have to be merciless, the punishment must be inescapable and inevitable, but as least cruel as possible. Also if Israel wanted genocide - they would have done it by now. All of gaza strip depends on Israel for their survival. Their goal is to break the will of hamas to attack israel. Not to wipe the place clean.

In a friction-less vacuum to be sure, but you also have to factor in the dirty bits of human nature and optics.

The women have less of a choice, I’m not without any morality.

Another factor Netanyahu will have to consider is his goal of rapprochement between Israel and a bunch of more despotic and American aligned Arab countries. A bloody ground war and occupation would kill such goals for many years to come

I think you underestimate the sheer venality and corruption of these puppet Arab regimes.

If the escalation continues, I think the Israeli politics will change beyond recognition in the near future. For some decades now the OG-European-Labour-Zionist-Secular elite of the country totally lost its grasp on democratic majorities but have been holding on to power through risky political shenanigans. Their preferred approach to the Arab problem has clearly failed. While they were in no way bastions of humanism towards Arabs, these people still represented much more Western instincts about what is acceptable to do against your enemy. At least they were careful that when they felt atrocities were necessary, they worked well on the Western PR. Things might get much uglier very fast in the near term.

The rise of Israeli religious-right is demographic and structural. I doubt this event will have any real bearing on political trends over the long-term. Besides, many of the seculars are just as hawkish on security matters even if they are better at optics.

I think you underestimate the sheer venality and corruption of these puppet Arab regimes.

Immovable object and unstoppable force clashes. The corruption of Arab regimes vs the Jew hate of their populations.

I doubt this event will have any real bearing on political trends over the long-term.

I actually think it might. The fears of a coup by the IDF/Mossad elite was always a limiting factor in the judicial overhaul ambitions of Netanyahu. Now the protests are going to be stopped for the foreseeable future and the army/intelligence extremely busy fighting a war under the command of Netanyahu. He has to win only once and break the institutional power of the old guard and it will be gone forever. Israel will be a forever changed country. He will have plenty opportunities now. So much so that a significant proportion of the people that I have sent "bro are you okay" messages yesterday eventually confessed to me they suspect some Netanyahu conspiracy about yesterday's events. Of course I don't agree with this take much, and I think this mindset is due to the omnipotency narrative the average Israeli has convinced himself about IDF/Mossad, and they reflexively do not want to even contemplate these institutions genuinely failing.

However in reality we are talking about a country of 6 million people

10 million.

9.73 million according to Wikipedia, 73.5% of them are Jewish. So almost exactly 7 million people that are “actually” Israeli (ie can be trusted to not turn into enemies if the opportunity arises). I was off by a million

The thing that's gotten me the most is the cheering crowds in the UK who have zero fear of being arrested on "hate speech" charges (unlike anyone who criticizes them), and the academics justifying it saying "Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop," with reminders that they're going to do it to Americans next
It's endless: Dartmouth, Berkeley, Columbia, CUNY, journal editors, professors, HR bureaucrats, the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping and screaming that my children are next with no fear of any consequences. Armed american terrorist groups who get hagiographies from NPR accusing anyone opposed to massacring children of being pearl clutching racists.
Random union twitter accounts posting "Palestine is rising, long live the resistance🌹" as if it was the most natural thing in the world for them to be doing, while the DSA organizes to support the attacks.

Spend an hour reading the "decolonization" tag. They are telling you what they are, and like Noah Smith I am getting "sort of negatively polarized against these people."

It feels less like masks dropping than like it happened so suddenly that everyone forgot to put their masks on in the first place. The Bataclan attack and European truck massacres developed slowly enough that people could adopt effective strategies: /r/news managed to delete all mention of the attacks for an entire day, and by the time it was acknowledged to have happened the party line was "this awful event had nothing to do with any cause we support."
Now we're just getting the raw unfiltered reactions, just like the combat footage, and we see what the real intentions are.

It's endless: Dartmouth, Berkeley, Columbia, CUNY, journal editors, professors, HR bureaucrats, the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping and screaming that my children are next with no fear of any consequences.

You literally linked to tweets showing that the "entire blue ecosystem" is not cheering for Hamas. If it was, then presumably the quoted persons wouldn't feel the need to make tweets stating their surprise that most people they know are expressing horror and disappointment regarding yesterday's events.

They might be going to far with saying they are happy.

But if I go to the front page of NYT it’s Israel blowing up an apartment building in Gaza. It’s not the brutal things your seeing on what I believe is mainstream twitter but perhaps I filter to people who find women in cages and men executed as brutal.

Israel doesn’t have the Christian/wokism religion of the west. In years past America would send there missiles with Democracy pamphlets; today with BLM stickers. Israel is going to go Old Testament vengeance on them and it’s not going to be couched in terms of improving Palestinian society. It will be eye for an eye (or probably 10 eyes) vengeance.

I’m probably an anti-Semite to the ADL. But I’ve got no problem greenlighting what will come.

Here’s more https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1710720164071973139?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

"A building gets blown up" has been a standard mainstream media imagery conveying the basic message that there's fighting and a war going on for a long time. "Kino", yet sterile - no-one can blame them for directly putting bloody, traumatizing images where kids can see them. Standard operating procedure. And any way one sees it, it is an extremely far cry from "the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping", an extremely risibly untrue claim that bears absolutely no relation to what I'm seeing on social media (which basically ranges from right-wingers eagerly calling for Israel to flatten entire Gaza to centrists and center-leftists condemning Hamas and eagerly bashing the few far-leftists who are going "Yes, this is bad, but the Israeli occupation..."

It’s not that they put a “building gets blown up” I found significant. It’s that they chose to show a Gaza building first instead of like a gang raped bloody Israeli female or even just the sanitized version of videos of Israeli women civilizan locked up in a basement.

They made a clear choice on whose violence to highlight. Though in the case of the apartment building the Israelis chose to warn the civilians first versus the Bronze Age violent committed by Hamas.

If "ecosystem" refers to people in charge, there is no contradiction between them cheering for Hamas and everyday leftists not doing so.

You don't stay in charge for long if your inferiors think you a monster.

…Well, in some cases you do, but that's not about normie Western PMCs.

Well, are these people in charge? The quoted tweeters seem to be basic worker-bee academics.

Advocating for terrorism has been a criminal offence in Canada since 2015, but I doubt we'll see any prosecutions even though the current government supported that legislation.

I honestly don't get the point of this tweet. Yes, radical Western left supports third world resistance movements. They did this for a century now. When it was safer to do so, they would even go and get military training in the El Fatah camps. All of this has been common knowledge there is no masks in the first place.

The DSA are supposed to be the good friendly leftists. The demsoc motte to the revolutionary communist bailey. "We're just trying to expand medicare" etc.

When the motte of your opponents goes "actually this is good thing" you are allowed to point out how mask off they've become.

A bit unrelated, but this give credence to the Fisted By Foucault theory on how Anglo-Saxon Academia is still an anti-systemic force. The Biden administration was quick to condemn and give support in any case. The Marcusian strategy "no enemy to the left" still holds strong, but at this point not many people are going to support the most extreme left-wing cause.

Btw, probably the most important point for the right that came from all of this is the fact that "decolonization", as all Marxian jargon like Anti-Imperialism, is only an academic term to justify whetever happens to the enemy.

I’m not sure I believe in Noah’s takes right now. Though I do think he’s correct in “sort of negatively polarized”. That stuff I think really helps Trump being the main factor. We will end up having a close election and these fringy parts of the Dem coalition will turn off voters.

But his end of Pax Romana take seems off to me.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/youre-not-going-to-like-what-comes

This is definitely possible. And one reason I support the Ukraine War. But I still think this is more in the column of “potential” and probably <50%. These Hamas attacks are not it. It’s so far more like 9/11 and the best reason for it seems to be to break the Saudi-Israel growing alliance. His main point for the end of the Pax Romana is China’s growing might. Concerning but I still tend to think they will try and fit in the system.

I think the bigger issue is internal fracturing of America harming our ability to act.

Concerning but I still tend to think they will try and fit in the system.

Why?

What possible motivation could the Chinese have to support the Pax Americana? They have been talking loudly for decades about the need to shift to a multipolar world and the replacement of the current system. They are explicitly allied with Russia in order to destroy the current system, and they have been working on projects to take the place of the current system for decades.

They are human. It’s in their own best interests. Pax Americana made them rich.

Pax Americana used to be good for them but no longer is, because Chimerica is over. The Chinese are not willing to stop being a superpower that flexes its military muscle at the very least in its claimed turf, and the US is not willing to suffer any unaligned superpowers with turfs to exist; nor allow them to catch up technologically even if they pinky-promise to behave. We'll most likely have a big war within 10 years or so, unless they collapse like the USSR.

China isn’t going to collapse. It’s possible they stagnate like Japan. I could agree with you on mistake theory grounds and China is making a policy mistake but the rules based international system led by America is still very beneficial to them.

I can also agree some of the culture package coming out of America isn’t ideal today. But countries in the system grow more and get richer.

Russia decided to suicide themselves. But rationalist would not do that.

Then you're free to conclude China isn't rational when they invade Taiwan.

...Don't you believe that China is likely to invade Taiwan?

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Have you listened to any political statements made by the Chinese government recently?

Pax Americana didn't make the Chinese rich, the US government corruptly selling the manufacturing base of the entire west to China made them rich. China is currently actively implementing alternatives to the USD for trade and actively forging alliances with countries violently opposed to the Pax Americana. They took what they needed from the Pax Americana and they're now just delaying their final exit in order to minimise the costs associated with that transition.

I don’t see any evidence we are living in a zero sum world. The only thing negative about western is the pride crap we export but you can just ban some movies for that.

The only thing negative about western is the pride crap we export but you can just ban some movies for that.

Have you heard of Taiwan? I don't think the Chinese government would agree with you on this front, and their opinion actually matters quite a bit when it comes to this topic!

Yes obviously I have, explain to me why an independent Taiwan is bad for them? A city-state of ethnic Han Chinese that pumps out of a ton of advanced tech and invest heavily in mainland China.

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Pax Americana has worked out really well for China so far. Maybe they like getting richer and richer in the current system.

Spend an hour reading the "decolonization" tag. They are telling you what they are, and like Noah Smith I am getting "sort of negatively polarized against these people."

With all due respect, I'm surprised more people didn't see this coming earlier. "Decolonisation" in its best form has always been one of those failed movements that inadvertently made way to more radical elements that are far less subdued in their hostility towards so called "western values", given the volatile nature of these polities and all around frustration stemming from within due to a lack of economic growth. It's like if the Ashraf Ghani government tried to "decolonise" and is shocked to find himself shaking hands with the Taliban. China did not really "decolonise" either, not any more than Japan or SK did, as much as they claim to be the alternative to western hegemony. The reality is the vast majority of Chinese in all major cities very much live as a westerner does. I'm sure both the government and the general public is well aware of this, though they may not publicly admit it.

That video of Hamas parading that woman's body and accounts of rape, child murders, etc., and several big Muslim names playing apologia, including a liberal Muslim journalist who used to write for Indian Express, might just be the straw that breaks the back for the hard left's camaraderie with 3rd world nationalisms.

The hard left is very much okay with 3rd World Nationalism by any means as long as it is from the "Oppressed". It is only a problem if it is a sentiment expressed by the outgroup.

I looked through the twitter likes of a few prominent Open Source Software developers. I lost any taste for writing Software outside of 9-5.

I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.

EDIT: Forget "nuanced" most of them say they had it coming, as the posters up the chain mention. I find this horrifying despite regarding the creation of Israel deeply unfair for Palestinians (though they haven't given a good showing since then).

...so you basically went around looking for pro-Hamas-offensive leftist comments to get angry at and then got angry at them?

Like I said earlier, the idea that "most of them say they had it coming" does not match my experience in social media at all, unless it's some sort of a circular definition of "most people who support Hamas say that what Hamas did was good". The feeling I'm getting is that American left is currently mostly in disarray over the events, and the "decolonialists" are at the very least getting a lot of pushback from the other sectors.

I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.

It is nuanced. You can freely debate whether the Versailles treaty drove Germany towards Nazism or not and neither position means you gleefully approve of either death camps or strategic bombing of population centers.

My "It is nuanced" was more in reference to the rhetorical device used to downplay something you don't want to discuss. I think it is important for a civilization to unconditionally condemn acts that cross a line of barbarity. Being able to understand and empathize with the motivations of a murder should not stop one from condemning the act.

This is different from an emotional "let's turn Gaza into a parking lot" response which I consider as problematic as the "they had it coming" arguments.

Some folks even drew equivalence to condemning Hamas' brutality against Israeli civilians with "All Lives Matter".

Spend an hour reading the "decolonization" tag. They are telling you what they are, and like Noah Smith I am getting "sort of negatively polarized against these people."

We implemented a rule against culture-warring precisely for that reason. It doesn't matter who you are, your brain is fundamentally susceptible to letting its emotions trump its rationality and logic. This is precisely why engaging the culture war at all is a highly dangerous task, the risk of neutral observation slipping into partisan advocacy is too high.

I would highly encourage 99% of people reading to just not bother reading that tag. It's not going to do you much good.

Not sure who to tag, but... mods, would it make sense to create a Megathread for all Israel-Gaza war posts? I get the feeling that this conflict will continue for some time -- if not the 'hot' phase of war, then certainly the aftermath -- and I would personally prefer to see this community's response in one spot rather than as responses to the latest intermittent comments that get posted here.

Seconded. This seems important enough to get a megathread for - if the Rittenhouse and Floyd 'events' were noteworthy enough to partition, this seems surely equal to that bar.

I concur. @Amadan & @naraburns could we do this?

Done.

Blessed are the mods.

My views on the whole affair can roughly be summed up with "Israel based, Palestine cringe", and since someone asked me if I was being ironic last time I said this, far from it.

Israel is an oasis in a hostile desert, about as glaring evidence of HBD as could be desired, not that there's a lack if you have eyes to see and a mind not blind to inconvenient truths. Arabs have and do much worse to each other than the Israelis ever have, and the average Palestinian is better off completely desisting from violent resistance, since I expect they would have a much better life as integrated citizens, even if they're of a tier below the Israelis, without voting rights and such. I can't see how they'd be accepted otherwise, since they outnumber them.

While I have no particular hatred of Palestinians, even if I view the whole Middle-Eastern memeplex with disdain, given how far it lies from my preferences, it's certainly obvious to me that their best bet for a peaceful existence would be to avoid poking at the lion that could swat them out of existence were it not for the optics.

Oh dear. You just gave them a reason to fuck optics, or at least the kind of optics that aren't thermal sights on F-16s and drones.

I guess massacring civilians and gangraping dual citizens who post on social media about supporting Palestine has that effect.

I like Israel, and the Jews as a whole when they aren't self-sabotaging by supporting ideologues who would end them. They're smarter than average, and the Ashkenazi (despite the Nazi in the name, which I always found mildly amusing) have more Nobels to them than most of the world put together.

What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.

They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.

They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.

You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average. I respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.

And if there's a way to end this whole mess without human rights getting wedgied and worked over by Mossad, the Palestinians certainly burnt that bridge yesterday.

I guess massacring civilians and gangraping dual citizens who post on social media about supporting Palestine has that effect.

The horror cherry on top of this cake of horror is this won't change anyone's minds. Pretty much nobody is going to stop supporting the Palestinians over Israel because of this, not even most of the survivors of the Rave for Peace.

Human minds are a thin veneer of civilization on top of naked tribalism, news at 11.

I suppose the only longterm good that might come of this is the hardliners in Israel make good use of public opinion to stamp Hamas and co out for good.

It might not help the terminally cucked Germans who are torn between voicing support for a liberal woman from their nation (who also happens to be Jewish) versus condemning the precious Palestinians, but it doesn't really matter. If Israel has the stomach for war, ain't nobody stopping them.

The Palestinians have every right to fight back when their land is being stolen. Do you not think Ukraine has killed people in its counter offensive?

The Ukranians have the right to fight back, not because their land was once stolen, but because their land was very recently stolen. The further back in time you go, the less your right to push back becomes, if Finland today attacked Russia to try and recover Karelia (this happened around the same time as the creation of Israel) people's sympathies for them would be nowhere near the level they have for Ukraine, and rightfully so.

Indeed, even in western countries like the UK, there are laws on Presciptive Easement where if someone uses a piece of land openly for some use for 20 years they do not own, eventually the government recognizes their claim on the land and hands it to them if the original owner tries to complain, and there are good reasons why such laws exist.

In Israel's case the land theft happened so far back and they have done so much to transform it that what exists now is nothing like what existed in 1950 (on the Israeli side at least), so they have a claim to keep it. And no, I don't expect "if you steal land you will be given 75 years (a lifetime) of hell, after which you'll be allowed to keep the land" to be much less of a deterrent/cause more moral hazard than "if you steal land you'll be given perpetual hell" in stopping people from stealing land.

if Finland today attacked Russia to try and recover Karelia (this happened around the same time as the creation of Israel) people's sympathies for them would be nowhere near the level they have for Ukraine, and rightfully so.

how does that work with Azerbaijan fighting for the land which independent country of Azerbaijan never controlled prior to 2023/2020?

Armenia put up a pretty big fight back in 2020, but then saw they were going to lose and their cause was a no hoper and bowed out with minimal losses. They absolutely have the right to try and fight and also the right to try and convince the rest of the world to support them, but recognized a lost cause when they saw one (unlike the Palestinians) after they were unable to muster up large amounts of international aid unlike Ukraine. I would be a lot less dismissive of an Armenian counteroffensive say around 2030 if they can put it together than I am of Hamas's usual shenanigans.

Armenia correctly made the decision to reset, recuperate and perhaps try again later, which is something the Palestinians would be wise to do too (and the strength difference between Israel/Palestine is like an order of magnitude bigger than the strength difference between Azerbaijan/Armenia, which should give the Palestinians extra cause to pause and reconsider, but we all know that likely won't happen).

Just because something is morally right doesn't mean it is logically right and vice versa. It's important to consider both of them when deciding your actions, and Hamas attacking Israel is so so logically wrong you need a mountain of "morally right" on your side for it to be a good thing in sum, and they don't have that.

Both sides ethnically cleansed each other on that land decades ago (and before that, too), and Armenia is a major ally of the US’ second largest geopolitical foe. Armenia is in many ways closer to Hamas (and not just for ethnat reasons) in that they fucked around and found out, even though (unlike Zionists) Karabakh Armenians could likely have lived a perfectly fine existence under Azeri rule if they hadn’t agitated from the 80s onward.

Karabakh Armenians could likely have lived a perfectly fine existence under Azeri rule if they hadn’t agitated from the 80s onward.

given long story of mutual pogroms it seems unlikely

The return to violence towards the end of the USSR was because of Armenian agitation. You can try counterfactuals and they’re not invalid, but I’m unsure that ethnic cleansing was in any way inevitable on the Azeri side if the Armenians had played ball.

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Putting a statute of limitations on revanchism is a good idea, but not one very compatible with the establishment of the State of Israel in the first place.

So they have a right to fight back against recent settlements.

Also, Gaza is under an illegal blockade, which they have every right to fight back against. Israel is a legitimate military target. They kill Palestinians, they have many Palestinians in torture camps. Israel continuous to destroy their farmland, steal their cattle, harass Palestinians and Palestinians are regularly killed by Israel.

So the jewish claim that Israel is their land is completely bogus after 2000 years?

Sure, the attacks yesterday were by and large not done against recently settled land in the West bank, it was on land Israel has settled for many decades now.

Also, Gaza is under an illegal blockade, which they have every right to fight back against. Israel is a legitimate military target.

Sure, but Israeli civilians are not a legitimate military target, and what we saw yesterday was by and large indiscriminatory killing. It wasn't even "we wanted to kill enemy combatants and these civilians were collateral damage" like Israel says to justify its civilian killing, it was straight up "lets kill party goers because they are there", that's at least a few degrees worse.

They kill Palestinians, they have many Palestinians in torture camps. Israel continuous to destroy their farmland, steal their cattle, harass Palestinians and Palestinians are regularly killed by Israel.

Yes, absolutely, that still does not give you the right to wantonly go out with the intent to kill civilians, desecrate their bodies and then parade them around. There are things worse than death, and Hamas put them on display yesterday.

I freely admit Israel doesn't care about Palestinian civilians and accepts their deaths a collateral damage, valuing their lives at near 0, but what Hamas did yesterday goes a few steps beyond that, what they did actively put a negative value on Israeli civilian lives.

Sure, the attacks yesterday were by and large not done against recently settled land in the West bank, it was on land Israel has settled for many decades now.

Interesting parallel to be drawn there with the idea that Ukraine should be more free to attack Russia proper instead of battering themselves against the prepared lines in the Donbass area -- Hamas clearly considers themselves at war with Israel proper, and I guess are acting accordingly. (apparently committing some war crimes in the process, which I expect will come back to haunt them -- but in terms of the armoured vehicles and such they've been attacking I don't think they can be faulted for not being strictly selective about where those are located.

Ukraine ‘could’ attack Russia proper (and obviously has in a very limited way), but it’s a fair restriction with donated munitions and the strategic value of an attack on Russia given asymmetric factors, nukes etc is questionable.

Russia proper

could you please use 'internationally recognized territory of Russia' instead.

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Gaza is under an illegal blockade

Given what they do with what they manage to get: I am not surprised that it is under blockade, legal or otherwise (note that any effective blockade needs support also from Egypt)

Do Algonquin natives have a right to shoot up Americans and Canadians for colonialism?

That's what the French and Indian war was. If there had been continued resistance, terrorism, and guerrilla fighting by the Native Tribes after the 19th century. Which year would it have gone from righteous to not righteous? 1935? 1970? 2001?

Yes, and in the example of the settlement of the Americas, almost all of “Western civilization”, even as authors sometimes romanticized native life, was on the general side of the colonizers and settlers. The point is that when it’s your family being raped, murdered and/or scalped, the noble savage of the plains rhetoric dies quickly. Israel is in the same place. The Palestinians have a ‘right’ to defend themselves, but exercising that right will only tighten the noose.

It becomes terrorism after the treaty is signed ending the war. If descendants of the Natives want to call those treaties unfair and demand reparations, I think they have a right to peacefully protest for it, and situationally I might even support their cause. They don’t have a right to commit violence.

Similarly, Arabs don’t have a right to start armed conflicts, and they’re in the wrong when they do so.

"Arabs don't have a right to start armed conflicts" seems like quite the broad claim. Could you explain your reasoning? Did Saudi Arabia not have a right to provide aid and intelligence to fight against ISIS?

As for the treaties, that bypasses a perceived issue of state vs non-state status. Lots of the people in question aren't meaningfully bound by a treaty, because they're from a different tribe, because their tribe wasn't organized enough to sign one, etc. Is a miqmaq obligated by a treaty signed by cherokee and anishinaabe? Presumably not, based on our understanding of how these work.

"Arabs don't have a right to start armed conflicts" seems like quite the broad claim. Could you explain your reasoning? Did Saudi Arabia not have a right to provide aid and intelligence to fight against ISIS?

To be clear, no one has the right to start armed conflicts. ISIS started the fight, Saudi Arabia is justified in fighting an aggressor.

As for the treaties, that bypasses a perceived issue of state vs non-state status. Lots of the people in question aren't meaningfully bound by a treaty, because they're from a different tribe, because their tribe wasn't organized enough to sign one, etc. Is a miqmaq obligated by a treaty signed by cherokee and anishinaabe? Presumably not, based on our understanding of how these work.

That's a fair point, and I would have to do a fair amount more thinking to come to what I would consider a fair belief about when natives are allowed to use violence to fight back vs not. But in any case, I don't think there's any reasonable justification where Palestinians can shoot up music festivals. At the very least, Palestininian leadership should make some clear demands from Israel and only start shooting after Israel says no, instead of just rejecting every Israeli deal as not good enough without making counter offers.

Ukraine had eminently good game-theoretic reasons to resist, because if countries only claimed to be willing to resist with force invasions by (maybe) superior powers, and then gave up the moment the odds were stacked against them, then they wouldn't last as countries very long, not even the Pax Americana can save them all.

Once you're past that, then it's time to consider alternatives, especially when continued resistance is nigh suicidal.

For what it's worth, I'm 50:50 on whether it's worth it for Ukraine to keep fighting with a maximal war goal, instead of accepting the annexation of its eastern fringes in a white peace.

As for Hamas, buddy just give up already, before you're dead, preferably.

They lost the war, vae victis. If they want to keep fighting, Israel has every reason to keep killing them.

A lot of these people were born after the war. Punishing them for the sins of their ancestors feels wrong. I wish there was an Arab country willing to take them in. Then I would feel comfortable letting the ones who refuse to leave suffer in poverty.

Punishing them for the sins of their ancestors feels wrong.

What punishment? Their ancestors lost the land, now they don't get said land; they had no independent claim to it. If they want to take the land their ancestors lost, Israel has every reason to keep killing them.

You make a good point.

The issue isn't simply that they don't have access to other land. As I understand, the issue is that the only land they have access to isn't actually governed by them, and they're limited in what they're allowed to do. Like, they can't receive packages without going through a long waiting period as it's inspected by the Israeli officials.

I don't know how much of their poor standard of living is due to not having statehood and how much is due to just them being bad at building a society. I'm not even arguing for any specific policy. I just mean that I feel sorry for them, and I have a moral impulse to help them, which I acknowledge.

What does it mean for land to be stolen in this context? We don't have any agreed upon system for deciding what country owns any given land in Israel or Palestine.

The Israeli settlers that have been demolishing churches and mosques in the past months while beating locals, stealing the cattle and raising their houses are clearly stealing land. The people who are defending the place they grew up clearly have a right to fight back.

This is the first I'm hearing about this. Where is that happening?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/4/israeli-settlers-storm-al-aqsa-mosque-complex-on-fifth-day-of-sukkot

The fight started a few days ago with a storming of one of Islams main holy sites.

The fact that the Al Aqsa mosque is even still standing is an extraordinary testament to Israeli tolerance. In the inverse situation, the Arabs certainly wouldn’t have left a rebuilt temple standing.

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Israel can do all of those wonderful without encroaching on Palestinian territory, tearing down their homes to make space for Israeli settlers. You are presenting a false dichotomy in which Israel must relentlessly expand into the West Bank, or give up its modernity and first-world characteristics.

I admire Israel for its development, and the contributions of its people to science and human knowledge. I want Israel to survive and thrive, and so I support their efforts to defend themselves. But I need not give them a blank check to do whatever they like. Israel does not need to build settlements in the West Bank to keep their country safe - just the opposite; these settlements create enmity among the Palestinians, and prevent reconciliation.

We must make a distinction between how a nation fights a war, and why they are fighting in the first place. I don't endorse the Palestinians' conduct in war. They inflict barbaric torture on civilians and capture soldiers. The Israelis do not. Yet we cannot conclude from these facts alone that Israel is in the right. When we zoom out and look at the broader picture, it is the Israeli side that has, in the last few decades, committed more infringements, and Palestine is justified in resisting.

What is Israel infringing on with their settlements? What is there to infringe against? There's no deal. There's no agreed borders.

Obviously they are infringing against Palestinian claims to the land, but notably those claims do not stop at the settlements - they claim all of Israel. Ask a Palestinian if he would rather see the latest Jewish settlements gone or Tel Aviv gone - he'll obviously choose the bigger city.

The settlements get attention because they are the marginal change, not because they are the core of the disagreement.

This makes me wonder where Israel/Palestine sympathies lie among YIMBY activists.

I dont think Hamas from Gaza is attack because of some Israeli encroachment on West Bank.

This would have happened even if Israel has not done this, though Israel did move a lot of IDF to the West Bank side for the settlers…. hmm

Israel can do all of those wonderful without encroaching on Palestinian territory, tearing down their homes to make space for Israeli settlers. You are presenting a false dichotomy in which Israel must relentlessly expand into the West Bank, or give up its modernity and first-world characteristics.

The Palestinians could also refrain from indiscriminate bombardment of civilian population centers. Or the gangrape.

Let's call it even?

But I need not give them a blank check to do whatever they like. Israel does not need to build settlements in the West Bank to keep their country safe - just the opposite; these settlements create enmity among the Palestinians, and prevent reconciliation.

My check isn't blank either, but it has room for quite a few zeroes on it.

When we zoom out and look at the broader picture, it is the Israeli side that has, in the last few decades, committed more infringements.

While I am of the opinion that historical grievances beyond living memory, or at least the memory of octogenarians, should be buried, a few decades seems like a rather early cut-off. The fact that the Palestinians don't do worse is reflective of their incapacity to do so, not a lack of desire for the same, or else they wouldn't be cheering at the sight of a hot blonde Israeli woman dead with blood and shit on her genitals.

Israel, on the other hand, has both means and motive, so I can give them points for being quite polite about things, for the most part.

The Palestinians could also refrain from indiscriminate bombardment of civilian population centers. Or the gangrape.

Israel doesn't need to build settlements to put a stop to this.

The fact that the Palestinians don't do worse is reflective of their incapacity to do so, not a lack of desire for the same, or else they wouldn't be cheering at the sight of a hot blonde Israeli woman dead with blood and shit on her genitals.

This and the rest of your arguments are all correct, but they don't refute my point. Israel has been and is continuing to provoke the Palestinians, and they do not need to do that.

Do you presume that refraining from building more settlements in contested territory is both necessary and sufficient for the animosity to end? I would have to disagree there.

Other than that, I too think you're correct, we're roughly on the same page, arguing about the punctuation.

As I think more about this, I may be changing my mind.

Do you presume that refraining from building more settlements in contested territory is both necessary and sufficient for the animosity to end?

Earlier this morning, I would have answered your question this way: "I don't know, but building settlements certainly doesn't help, and so Israel can't say they are acting entirely in self-defense."

But I just remembered that Arabs have much higher birth rates than Jews, so if Israel stops all interference in Palestine, the balance of power may shift decisively in the latter's favor. Palestine today is not capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on Israel, but that could change if the difference in birth rates is sustained. So there may be an argument here that Israel has no choice but to do what it is doing today - to wholly conquer and subjugate the Palestinians...

My apologies for being indecisive! This is my first time writing about this issue, and I am realizing that there are gaps in my thinking.

But I just remembered that Arabs have much higher birth rates than Jews, so if Israel stops all interference in Palestine, the balance of power may shift decisively in the latter's favor.

This is just wrong though? It's an old trope, popular both with Palestinians ("Our women's wombs are our greatest weapon!") and with Jews ("those fecund savages are swelling up like yeast, we must not fall behind!") but in actuality Arab fertility has been declining, Jewish one has been stable, and so they've converged in Israel:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives.

Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing, ignoring a 100% artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Judea and Samaria Arabs, an inflated birth rate and deflated death rate.

Official Palestinian TFR is like 3.57 but even if we take that at face value and assume it won't decline (it obviously will, they don't have any cultural immunity or institutional capacity to resist the background anti-natalist pressure, unlike Jews), it won't provide for a stark divide in the foreseeable future – and of course the subset of Jews who disproportionately contribute to the trend, Haredim, themselves have a TFR of 6-7, so they're on a much faster exponential and will be a counterweight to Arabs on their own by the end of the century. Specifically, they have like 1.2 million people now and grow at 4% annually; Palestinians are at 5 million and grow 2.5% annually – both will be between 20-30 million strong.

I don't think the birth rate difference is important. But I do think it's important to understand that this conflict does not go away if Israel stops building settlements. That's the marginal issue. But it's not the core issue.

The grim reality is that it's impossible to have peace because a great many Palestinians do not want peace.

But I just remembered that Arabs have much higher birth rates than Jews, so if Israel stops all interference in Palestine, the balance of power may shift decisively in the latter's favor. Palestine today is not capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on Israel, but that could change if the difference in birth rates is sustained. So there may be an argument here that Israel has no choice but to do what it is doing today - to wholly conquer and subjugate the Palestinians...

You're in some extremely dangerous territory here.

The argument you've deployed is also completely applicable to white nationalism and the extermination of people of colour. Maybe you are actually a white nationalist who thinks that is a good idea, but if you aren't I think you owe it to yourself to explain exactly what differentiates the two situations.

My apologies for being indecisive! This is my first time writing about this issue, and I am realizing that there are gaps in my thinking.

No worries, we're here to debate after all, and if people reconsider their perspectives, that's The Motte working as intended!

Israel, on the other hand, has both means and motive, so I can give them points for being quite polite about things, for the most part.

Actually, I don't think they do have the means. If they actually did just go and ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip they would lose substantial amounts of the international support they require to continue to exist. Israel is only sustainable at all due to massive flows of materiel from the West, and while their consent manufacturing/influence operations are incredibly powerful, they are still ultimately subject to a public opinion which would come down extremely hard if they just started a second holocaust and wiped out the muslims.

Israel gets about $3 billion in aid from the USA per year. Their defence budget is $23 billion.

It's an exaggeration to say they can't exist without western support.

That 3 billion is far from the only support that Israel gets from the west. They benefit from the military activities of the USA, the countless remittances to Israel and Israeli support initiatives run by Israeli partisans in other societies around the world. Significant investments and factories were built there not because it made good economic sense for the companies involved, but because the people in those companies wanted to support Israel. Even in my country, I can't go shopping at a major shopping mall without having some portion of the money I spend go to Israel, because the owner of the company is (or was, I haven't checked in a while) a zealous supporter of Israel and the IDF.

I don't believe you're thinking seriously about the issue at all if you think that $3 billion figure is the be-all and end-all of Western support for Israel.

countless remittances

0.28% of Israeli GDP.

"Countless" is a fun word, you can use it to make a number sound like it's really big when actually you just haven't bothered counting.

Yes, you've pointed out that one of the sources of western contribution to Israeli welfare isn't that large a portion of their GDP. I didn't really expect remittances to be much more than that - I said countless because those remittances would usually consist of large numbers of smaller payments. Furthermore, look at the definition that your source is using - this only counts money being sent back by Israelis who migrate to other countries. A jewish individual raised in France who sent money to pro-Jewish charity organisations would not show up on this chart according to the methodology listed there - but even if not, that doesn't really hurt my argument. 0.28% of GDP might not sound like much, but that stuff adds up over the years, and consistent financial support like that can make a big difference over time... to say nothing of all the other factors I named and which weren't refuted.

If that's the extent of your argument against my position I must confess that my mind has not been changed.

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This is such a strange take. The US set up client states in Jordan and Egypt to stop them from attacking Israel. It finances half the Lebanese political factions for this purpose (and even Hezbollah!). The entire Iraq war (2-3 TRILLION dollars depending on calculation methods) realistically had no other purpose than to eliminate a regime Israel wanted gone. It still stations around 30.000 soldiers around Middle East, with realistically no other purpose than to deter anyone who might want to mess with Israel. Almost any random deal US sponsors around the world will include some small ridiculous clauses to give Israel a bit more diplomatic legitimacy. US is unable to normalize relations with Iran, even though this would make a great amount of geopolitical sense, because Israel doesn't want it.

The list can go on and on. And I am not getting into items like the French giving Israel nuclear arms technology or massive sums of blood money West Germany paid for Israel's industrialization.

The 3 billion direct military aid is absolutely nothing compared to what America and Europe actually provides to Israel.

The Iraq War was because American intelligence thought there really were WMDs and because Saddam had previously lied about them and aroused America's displeasure.

I respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.

Why?

Why?

Dodging the entire moral philosophy question for the moment, civilizational and economic competence are important for every goal. Want water that doesn't give you deadly diseases? Want to not have violent crime? Want to treat diseases so a large percent of your population doesn't die young? Want your smartest to be poets and physicists instead of farmers and street hagglers? Certainly some of these are related to morality.

If the Palestinians simply gave in, stopped all forms of resistance, and accepted annexation and (likely temporary) second class citizenship, they'd be much better off within a decade. And that 'better off'ness includes fewer deaths from disease, greater happiness, etc. The human rights violations don't really change that, and they're ongoing anyway, and you can try to fix them if you want, but either way self's solution is still better.

But Israel hasn't been (seriously) talking about annexation (expect for particular territories designed to render West Bank into unviable enclaves) or any sort of a citizenship, first-class or second-class or whatever, for Palestinians.

An existence as a peaceful lower middle income protectorate of Israel would afford Palestinians a relatively decent standard of living by non-petrostate Arab standards, the chance to continue practicing most of their religion and culture, and the ability to live decent enough lives like the rest of the global middle.

The difference is, I think, that as @Pasha says, this is an extremely honor based culture even by non Hajnali standards. They are, for now, too proud. And let’s be real, their treatment has been undignified. They have just cause for war, and though they do not for the kind of savage war crimes on display yesterday, they’re hardly surprising either.

And so the only options are to crush their will and to humiliate them utterly, or to give in, it’s hard to conceive of a third option.

I am tagged so I feel like adding something. I think most Western-oriented people (including me) has had the experience of an incredibly visceral reaction yesterday to the images of gunned men of another culture violating the family homes, taking away women and leaving death and destruction behind them. We all felt this because they could be our houses and they could be our women. Israeli politicians are talking about basically genocide and the Air Force has been dropping a bomb per minute ever since. This is how the Palestinians have felt at least once a month for 4 generations at this point. Their entire culture is a coping mechanism to deal with this extreme constant humiliation. I can't begin to fathom how childish someone has to be to suggest that THIS MAN just surrender to the killers of his child in exchange for becoming their low-wage servant.

I think from a Western orientated POV it feels like a rather absurd situation in which our position of power is being couched in almost absurd levels of coddling for people from certain cultures, compared to historical norms (and what they'd do to us if in a similar position of supremacy) and that the whole thing feels like increasingly there's no coherent reason to be so utterly indulgent aside from pure bleeding-heart sympathy.

I would recommend people with such sentiment to remember this is exactly how Russians felt two years ago. Or the US multiple times in the recent memory. Sometimes your seemingly weak enemies can make some powerful friends or exploit structural imbalances to deny you your goals long enough that it turns into a defeat.

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The alternative to surrendering to those killers is almost certain death. I mean, what do you say to the surviving (American) Indian in 1880 whose tribe has been mostly killed in conflict with settlers / the government? To run into the bullets?

Surviving in many cases meant the opportunity for more children, descendants, a genetic legacy, life, the things that all people intrinsically seek. But then perhaps this is a difference in kind, after all Jews lived at the mercy of others, often humiliated, for many centuries, so perhaps we cannot understand those for whom death is always better than a life on one’s knees.

The alternative to surrendering to those killers is almost certain death

Palestinians haven’t surrendered for 80+ years at this point and their genetical material is passing along quite successfully.

Israel isn’t omnipotent. It left Gaza before back when it had half the population, Hamas-Iran axis didn’t exist and the US was the absolute world hegemon, unquestionably committed to Israel. There weren’t 100 Jewish hostages in Gaza.

None of these conditions are true anymore. It’s a much richer and casualty sensitive country. Cheap drones are leading to a revolution in asymmetric warfare. US is distancing itself from Middle East.

Israel can inflict incredible casualties in Gaza. But can they really pacify the region? Or even beat hamas without leading to a much more radical faction taking over? I have serious doubts. And as long as Palestinians persist, all it takes for them is one victory at some point in the future.

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I think there is a resurgence of anti-Hamas sentiment because at this point in time Israel has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Israel is not going to be the monolithic society they once were in the last century. Palestinians are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Israel to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Palestinians will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role and without that transformation, Israel will not survive. ~ Barbayla Spectaj

I agree, the particulars of the situation don't really point to any good options. I'm trying to provide examples of why being okay with a semi-ethnostate or human rights violations is fine if it comes along with more important things.

Are you okay with this argument being applied to a hypothetical white American or white European ethnostate?

Yes. This would apply to, for instance, African nations being materially better off without decolonization, even if it meant still being ruled by somewhat-racist policies.

No one is disputing the value of civilization and technological improvement. What I'm disputing is the idea that they are so important as to offer a moral offset when we ask if a civilization is immoral on the whole.

Sure, Israel is net immoral. Probably everyone is net immoral, there are always ways to be better, and always horrible mistakes one's making at some scale. You can't find a country that isn't killing its inhabitants with obesity, addictive drugs, or something. Although I don't think 'preventing-harm-to-the-downtrodden' is the pinnacle of one's duty in one's life, it applies either way - the Great Man who only accomplishes part of his potential is, in the same sense, net immoral.

I don't see the practical relevance, though. Yeah, Israel clearly should treat Palestinians better, whether for humanitarian or self-interested reasons. Palestinians should also stop attacking Israel. Every state of relevance, including the US, conducts pointless conflicts. Yet we should still, perhaps, be able to apply terms like 'respect' to these states. And then, yeah, I respect Israel a lot more than Palestine, a lot more than most other states.

Sure, Israel is net immoral. Probably everyone is net immoral, there are always ways to be better, and always horrible mistakes one's making at some scale. You can't find a country that isn't killing its inhabitants with obesity, addictive drugs, or something.

The problem is that of intention. It's one thing to say that there are inevitable costs to, say, policing and some people will end up being hurt when they are. But it's an entirely different thing to say that we shouldn't try to prevent those from happening in the first place.

If the Palestinians simply gave in, stopped all forms of resistance, and accepted annexation and (likely temporary) second class citizenship, they'd be much better off within a decade.

Would they really?

After seeing the Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians I have a hard time believing this - and I have an even harder time believing that someone on the political left would find having a European colony create an explicit underclass of brown people to be acceptable in any way. Given the actual statements and revealed preferences of Israeli figures, I think the Palestinians would actually be substantially worse off in this situation.

If only we had a control group of Israeli arabs to compare the living standards of against Gaza.

I fully realize this comment might get me in trouble and it is ad-hominem and "tasteless". I will delete it if mods say so and apologize. It is even embarrassing if I got my basic assumption wrong. Here we go though..

I strongly suspect the real reason is because he is Indian, and the said occasional human rights violations are against Muslims. HBD is a thin veneer used to justify seeing human beings as bugs to be crushed because they aren't technologically advanced enough. Online high-caste Indian men seem to be highly susceptible to such viewpoints, probably because of their experience of living in India of all places, the pinnacle of HDB inequality.

I strongly suspect the real reason is because he is Indian, and the said occasional human rights violations are against Muslims

Bruh. I remember you making the same completely unfounded claim about me before, which I immediately pushed back against.

I'm secularly irreligious, largely hating most religion equally, albeit a few annoy me enough to earn more of my scorn. Muslims, Hindu fundamentalists, roughly about as bad as I'm concerned, even if the latter are currently in power.

I'm sure you've seen me ~politely squabble with the local Mormons and miscellaneous denominations of Christianity here too.

On a more forgivable error, I didn't come to believe in HBD while living in India, or at least not while observing Indians growing up.

Living in an upper-middle class bubble tends to blur everything together, especially when I'm unusually bad at figuring out caste from surnames, and I didn't even know what caste I was until I was around 19 (it's not high at all, just a cut above people who get affirmative action in fact, woe is me that I had to get into med school the hard way).

Now, actual med school, where I had to restrain endless fury that I had ended up shunted off to a backwater while my Scheduled Class classmates, if they didn't gotten upgraded a few days later to a far better one, had ranks twice as bad I did in the competitive exam, while being visibly worse at things.. Yeah, that'll radicalize you, or at least make you listen when the oldies mumble when not in public. Huh, seems like they were on to something after all.

I hope you remember this time, not that it really matters.

Better than speculating "He only believes that for tribal reasons" would be to... ask him. Yes, we generally dislike people lobbing identity-based arguments at each other. We also prefer you don't delete posts. Whether or not you want to apologize is up to you.

That is a fair point. I will do so the next time. I am quicker to assume such things when people are low key advocating for ethnic cleansing.

I am a South Asian Muslim (technically outside the caste system, which is a Hindu thing, but in reality there is an informal system that everyone knows), and I also

respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.

Err, it's the entire rest of my comment.

What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.

They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.

They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.

You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average.

No, I mean why do you endorse a position in which technology and civilization have such value that they can balance out moral obligations? Most people would say that morality comes first, always. In a sense, that's precisely what morality is, the rules that hold utmost importance and must be obeyed should there ever be any conflict. You don't even dispute the idea that what Israel is doing is immoral.

You say that technological innovation and civilization creation are aspects in which Israel does so well that its immoral actions can be ignored. Would you say the same if the costs or consequences of those actions fell on you or those you cared about? If the cost for Israel's success was the death of your parents, your wife, your children, or even you, would you still make the same argument?

Now, you could argue that your human responses are irrational. Feelings are stupid and gay, after all, there's no reason your chemical reaction to seeing your family killed by a drone should dictate the actual morality you hold to. But talk is cheap. I've debated people who struck me as incapable of separating the reality we all inhabit from any hypothetical world I proposed. It's easy to bite bullets about what you would accept when the only one biting actual bullets are your adversaries.

I would say it's largely because my own idiosyncratic morality can differ quite significantly from the norm.

I'd go so far as to say that people who are 100% on board with all the values preached around them are NPCs, which is what I gave as my definition for the term when someone asked in a CW thread a while back. Seemed to match up with most of the answers too.

Most people would say that morality comes first, always. In a sense, that's precisely what morality is, the rules that hold utmost importance and must be obeyed should there ever be any conflict.

This is a deontological take, and I'm a consequentialist.

Such a naive approach runs into the immediate roadblock of someone pointing out how you resolve the Kantian imperatives of not lying and not letting someone come to harm when an murderer knocks on your door and asks where you friend is. (Or the SS comes for the Jews in your annex, if we're to stay close to the topic at hand)

Keep resolving the edge cases, blatant conflicts and order of operations, and you have a dumbed down version of utilitarianism/consequentialism. Reality isn't so kind that it always gives you one option unreproachably better than the other.

(Some suggest that Deontology can also be considered Utilitarianism for Dummies, or people who don't trust themselves to think too hard, which is close enough, we don't have infinite computing power in our skulls and some heuristics are good enough to use most of the time. I'm also not a Benthamian Utilitarian/Effective Altruist, I just model myself as having a utility function)

There are plenty of people who proclaim democracy as valuable in-of-itself, and point to downstream observations about socio-economic output as a justification for the more hard-headed.

Well, I'll happily sacrifice some democracy for a lot of wealth, and I would head to Singapore right away if they didn't only take the top 0.1% of doctors from India.

Further, what comes when we make an AGI (which is obedient instead of killing us immediately)? It takes chutzpah to think that humans should be the ones micromanaging it, instead of asking it to examine our goals and desires and figure out what's best for us, even if we enforce a requirement to let us decide in the end.

I would take being utterly politically powerless in a post-scarcity society over being the ruler of a state like Palestine. And you know what, that's the same dilemma they face. Surrender their useless autonomy, already well compromised, and accept Israeli rule, which very much wants to be kind, or else they'd have leveled the strip.

As for Human Rights?

Spit. They're a contingent outcome of immense global wealth where we can agree to pretend that they descend from the heavens or emerge fully formed from our temples, not pure Logos that we stray from at risk of eternal damnation.

In other words, they're nice to have as Schelling Points, not sacred as far as I'm concerned. And eventually every single one ends up riddled with exceptions for the public good and whatever the bored judge or civil servant feels like that afternoon.

Would you say the same if the costs or consequences of those actions fell on you or those you cared about? If the cost for Israel's success was the death of your parents, your wife, your children, or even you, would you still make the same argument?

Nope. I wouldn't say that if that was the price, but once again, Palestinians don't face that tradeoff either. They could diminish their risk of drone strikes killing them and their loved ones to ~0% by not doing everything in their limited power to piss off their more powerful neighbors.

Or condoning and celebrating those who do, to an extent.

Now, you could argue that your human responses are irrational. Feelings are stupid and gay, after all, there's no reason your chemical reaction to seeing your family killed by a drone should dictate the actual morality you hold to. But talk is cheap. I've debated people who struck me as incapable of separating the reality we all inhabit from any hypothetical world I proposed. It's easy to bite bullets about what you would accept when the only one biting actual bullets are your adversaries.

You can have mine for free, I'm commenting here because I like to, not because I have a Substack or Patreon to shill (maybe later). I'm sure I'm inconsequential in the greater scheme, and I've made my peace with that long ago, as long as things keep improving.

If the modal Palestinian was that pragmatic, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Keep resolving the edge cases, blatant conflicts and order of operations, and you have a dumbed down version of utilitarianism/consequentialism. Reality isn't so kind that it always gives you one option unreproachably better than the other.

I understand that morality is hard. That's not the same as saying that the creation of technology or civilization is itself a moral good.

And eventually every single one ends up riddled with exceptions for the public good and whatever the bored judge or civil servant feels like that afternoon.

You're letting implementation dictate the value of the theoretical.

Nope. I wouldn't say that if that was the price, but once again, Palestinians don't face that tradeoff either. They could diminish their risk of drone strikes killing them and their loved ones to ~0% by not doing everything in their limited power to piss off their more powerful neighbors.

But then you're also okay if Israel happens to, intentionally or with reckless disregard, kill Palestinians who do precisely that because the Israelis think this particular person or family are terrorists or criminals. After all, these are the "occasional human rights violations" you're talking about.

I'm sure I'm inconsequential in the greater scheme, and I've made my peace with that long ago, as long as things keep improving.

Meaning that your statements on any moral issue are contingent upon whether you have political or social power, correct?

I understand that morality is hard. That's not the same as saying that the creation of technology or civilization is itself a moral good.

I deny that objective morality even exists. Or that it's a even a coherent concept!

As far as my personal subjective morality goes, I don't find it particularly difficult, not as much as say, quantum mechanics or memorizing every single fucking interaction in medicine I am expected to learn for the next set of exams I need to give.

Not that I let moral relativism stop me from being a moral chauvinist, why, yes, I prefer my own morals, and I think society would be better off adopting it.

Whether the creation of a technology is a moral good or not obviously depends on the technology, even for an unabashed transhumanist? Gain of function research? Hell no. Eliminating mosquitoes with gene drives? Hell yes. AI? Depends, will it save us or kill us? In expectation I slightly lean towards the former, even if I worry about the latter.

Civilization is a social technology in itself, us bootstrapping from Monke to apotheosis.

Of course the net sum of all technological advances since fire has been overwhelmingly positive, and if Ted K wants to disagree, sucks to be dead I guess. May we develop the technology to solve that particular problem soon.

You're letting implementation dictate the value of the theoretical.

And?

I hereby declare that it's a Human Right to be free from the tyranny of gravity, if not Israeli occupation. Look, I don't float, at least not without a rocket.

What is a Right to Internet Access without the internet? Healthcare, without at least 20th century medicine?

But then you're also okay if Israel happens to, intentionally or with reckless disregard, kill Palestinians who do precisely that because the Israelis think this particular person or family are terrorists or criminals. After all, these are the "occasional human rights violations" you're talking about.

Ain't nobody perfect. It's still the smart decision, even if the dice or Mossad roll against you.

Meaning that your statements on any moral issue are contingent upon whether you have political or social power, correct?

A little? Not that I would even frame it as a bad thing, per se. It should be clear by now that I consider morality to be quite contingent on the circumstances one finds one's self in.

I hereby declare that it's a Human Right to be free from the tyranny of gravity, if not Israeli occupation. Look, I don't float, at least not without a rocket.

You sure? I just tried it and cracked levitating. Maybe you aren't believing strongly enough.

Jokes aside, I think 'objective' morality is an incoherent concept, because objectivity is an incoherent concept! Jordan Peterson has some great discussions on how everything bottoms out to morality - basically related to relevance realization a la John Vervaeke and how there are so many facts out there (like impossible numbers) that you have to have some a priori framework to get them down to a manageable size to make decisions on.

There's also Hume's is-ought gap, if you're looking for the steelmanned version of what I think @drmanhattan16 is trying to argue.

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I deny that objective morality even exists. Or that it's a even a coherent concept!

I said nothing about objective morality.

Civilization is a social technology in itself, us bootstrapping from Monke to apotheosis.

And why is that itself a moral good?

What is a Right to Internet Access without the internet? Healthcare, without it?

You understand that we can abstract these things, right? For example, the right to use contemporary means of private messaging. Letters in the past, DMs today.

Ain't nobody perfect. It's still the smart decision, even if the dice or Mossad roll against you.

But you certainly seem to be indifferent to how imperfect they may be.

If the Israelis were having Predator drones (or whatever their equivalent is) bomb a random house in each block every day, would you say that's just "imperfection"? What if they decide to genocide by bullet the Palestinians entirely, but they also promise a cure for cancer?

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Feel free to enlighten me.

You do realize that much of the repression is almost at the bare minimum necessary for a country of barely 6 million people to monitor several times that number who hate their guts, while living close enough to jog over? Or bike. Or paraglide into a concert and rape the hottest chick who skipped cardio.

The Israelis are not genocidal, despite being victims of one successful genocide in barely living memory, and more that could have plausibly followed if the Arabs had been able to push them into the ocean.

Once again, I beseech you to submit an actual argument regarding why the living conditions of the average Palestinian wouldn't jump, if not to First World standards, something much more respectable, if they didn't use their schools and hospitals to operate an insurgency while using their own populace as shields.

Yeah, they might not be able to vote if they unified, but if you insist using your franchise on bringing Hamas or its sympathizers back into power on the regular, my sympathies are slim.

Edit: For anyone curious, it was a drive by comment accusing me of holding kindergarten grade views about the situation in occupied Palestine, presumably deleted when they worried the mods might notice. They still see deleted comments dawg.

I'll jump in on the side of your interlocutor and just say that while I have massive respect for your hardline consquentialist views (you really play it to the hilt!) I tend to agree that morality has to come first.

Would you not agree that as a technocratic consequentialist, you take on faith things like Scientific Objectivity and Technological Progress as goods? Or of course 'Utility,' although it's such a vaguely defined catchall I'd rather use something like 'virtue.'

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No, I mean why do you endorse a position in which technology and civilization have such value that they can balance out moral obligations? Most people would say that morality comes first, always.

Top level post on this coming soon from yours truly. Stay tuned to the next episode of Dragon Ball Z TheMotte.

Truly he has obtained great powers since rising. I eagerly anticipate the next gospel.

Oh dear, I seem to be gathering apostles... Make it end mom, I'm not the Messiah, I'm a very naughty boy...

Lmao, why not both?! And hey, you can't rise from the dead and not expect to gather disciples. Come on now, you really should know better. ;P

I might be able to simplify your argument and agree. Jews are too important to civilization. I wouldn’t be shocked if their 14.7 million people contribute 25% of scientific output. Their high fertility orthodox communities will have a portion secularized and end up contributing hugely to pushing society forward.

It’s similar to why Elon Musks was protected for a long time from his majorly security law violations. He was too important. At the end of the day Jews are important.

Just as an aside, what value I continue to see in this forum is that it offers at least some sort of a dispassionate ground to discuss the tactical and strategic aspects of a conflict like this, which I find far more interesting than endless decriminations over modern dating or trans stuff or whatever. Twitter, certainly, is currently almost unusable for a discussion like this, even the local Twitter (in a country where the I/P conflict has far less valence than in many other European countries).

I'm reading mostly what the 'rational' pathway towards Israel's victory is. Which, so far, is mostly achieved through some form of PR friendly killing of non-combatants.

I think the line between 'dispassionate' and whatever 'passionate' is in this context is aesthetic at best. I personally prefer the honesty of passion over the pretense that whatever is being discussed here by overt and covert Zionists isn't just as barbaric and tribal as the 'passionate' expressions. That goes for those who forgo commenting on this topic as well.

I certainly wouldn't have entertained the notion of proposing that the end of the conflict can only be achieved through strategic culling of civilians and the routine killing of jewish first born boys. A comment which spurs the question of why we wouldn't kill potential jewish mothers instead... But here we are.

Plenty of this is indeed people simply living out their genocidal fantasies with a veneer of HDB/rationality/geopolitics. But there is good reason to suggest that the half-humanitarian/half-murderous approach of Israel towards this issue in the last generations have collapsed entirely yesterday and things will be different in the future. There is still value in discussing "how", even from nasty viewpoints, because people making these decisions also often have such viewpoints.

I don't care about the discussion happening. Unlike the mods here I don't have a chance to discriminate like that. Overt and covert jew supremacists can talk all they want as far as I am concerned. I appreciate that these events at least manage to draw out some human honesty in people who otherwise sit on the sidelines as two of their outgroups clash whilst giving dispassionate and rational commentary on what's happening. Which sure is easy when your team isn't playing, let me tell you.

I care about the proposition that the thin veneer of calm and collected rationalism that it shrouds itself in is in any way a relevant distinguishing factor from any of the discourse that is and would otherwise be sneered at as being low brow or insane.

There are posters here who get called out as being holocaust deniers and neo-nazis when they post. Just as a reminder or warning to others of what they are. Well, how many of the Zionist jew supremacists here are the exact carbon copy of that sort of poster? 'Israel did nothing wrong!'. Minimize and deny atrocities, flex history to suit their narratives and do it all under the guise of rationality and 'dispassionate discourse'. Can I call out the jewish supremacists here who pontificate on the culling of children to suit their nationalist ideology? At least the neo-nazi here has the tact to deny past atrocities rather than openly plan for new ones.

I mean, lets be honest here, if anyone in the past had suggested that the only peaceful end to the I-P conflict could be found with every jewish first born boy staring down the barrel of a shotgun I think the fine jewish supremacists here would find it very easy to report the comment. Let alone if someone was psychoanalyzing themselves to get past the hump of just killing would be mothers before they had a chance to give birth to a 'problem'. No, I've seen comments here designed by trolls to incite exactly the sort of nasty viewpoints you are talking about and they get banned.

I would say that this place is kind of insane, but it's not. It just has no self awareness. I wish it would gain some so we can stop pretending that there exist rifts between the neo-nazi and the average jew supremacist here. Having sat through years of dispassionate moral grandstanding at the hands of people who now either sit awfully quiet when the ball is in their court or are going full oy-vey-88... yeah.

I don't see why these events should change anything from a rationalist perspective. After all, there are still people here in favor of mass immigration despite the harm its caused in Europe and the US.

My advice to jews everywhere is to turn the other cheek and genuinely open their hearts and society to the Palestinians who are obviously hurting a lot right now. Violence is never the answer. This is the only way for Israel to survive.

Yes, looking for interesting commentary in the sea of nationalist rage, confident posts by people who don't know what they are talking about, and various kinds of copium/hopium gets annoying. I get why people who either live in the war zone or know people who live there get that way, I am pretty sure that I would too. But it's not just coming from those people, it's also coming from people who have no direct connection to the conflict. There is usually a bunch of moralistic grandstanding that is so simplistic it could have been written by a 1970s-era computer plus a bunch of people chiming in who think that they have something interesting to say because unlike the average person, who reads zero things about geopolitics a year, they read five or six.

The above applies to supporters of both sides. And not just to this conflict.

Ever since I started learning anything about the long-term relationship between Israel and Palestine, I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing. It seems to me that Bibi and others that are branded as "hard right" have come to a similar conclusion, even if they don't say as much out loud, and have pursued it by means of slow-moving settlements that inevitably provoke violence, allowing them to bolster security, pushing that cycle indefinitely to solidify Zionist state control of the region. While I won't go as far as saying that this morning's developments make Bibi happy, I think he will immediately see them as strategically useful and proceed accordingly.

I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.

I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.

The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel.

Shouldn't this have been the case with Republicans circa 9/11? Instead, the guy that was in charge when 9/11 happened saw a massive increase in approval and the intelligence agencies got a massive increase in power.

Bush had only been in power a bit over half an year, so Repscould plausibly (implicitly at first) claim that the fault was with Clinton admin.

I don't think the compact was the same. Psychologically-speaking, the United States had lived through decades of peace. An attack by an outside enemy on the homeland was practically unthinkable. It was not the covenant of the government of the day to prevent something that was unimagineable and unpredictable (at least to the average citizen). This was why in part the American bloodlust after 9/11 was so extreme.

By contrast Israel has been under a siege mentality their entire existence, and after 1973 the threat shifted from outside state actors and their conventional armies to terrorism. The threat of the Second Intifada in particular was that violent death could visit any Israeli at any time. The border wall, the Iron Dome, the hostage trades; the government of Israel (under various parties) has undertaken immense cost and effort to save the lives of handfuls of citizens. I'm not sure there's been another government so willing to spend money to save the life of the individual at the margin (at least at the hands of their enemies).

Yeah, I think the response is going to determine how this works out for Bibi. If in short order is displaying the heads of Hamas on pikes outside the walls of Jerusalem (or whatever the modern equivalent is) this will help him.

I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing

You're correct and many Israelis of the hard-right and even some on the center-left have publicly lamented that Ben-Gurion didn't "finish the job of 1948" where Israel ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands in what the Palestinians refer to as "The Nakba". There was another round of ethnic cleansing during the aftermath of 1967.

Since then, the political pressure on Israel has ratched up significantly and even if international opinion is with them now, I highly doubt the West would allow forcible removal of millions of Palestinians today. More importantly, I also suspect the Palestinians would put up a lot more resistance today than their grandparents as they're far better armed and co-ordinated at a local level than they were in the 1940s or 1960s.

In addition, such a large-scale ethnic cleansing would invariably drag in Arab neighbours and kill any attempt at normalisation with Saudi Arabia and dial back the Abraham Accords. Hezbollah is also armed to the teeth and could well join the fray. So I highly doubt something like this would happen. Israel is just boxed in with no good options.

On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

I think people won't care. Or rather, leftists who visibly care will discredit themselves. Like, there's talk of international opinion, but what do you do concretely? Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages? And while a true ethnic cleansing is not out of the question, more realistically they'll simply permanently occupy Gaza and turn it into an actual open air prison, whether after the hostages are recovered or after the stream of atrocities decreases the public tolerance for giving in to hostage tactics.

These events certainly drive home the point that Hamas is the best Palestinian ruling party that Israeli hawks could have had, to the point that intel leaks leading to this disaster should be investigated with an eye for 4D chess (nothing will be found though). This obviates the conflict over judicial reform, demonstrates to Haredim the necessity of cooperation with the secula authority and the military, builds up the momentum for war with Iran, generally accelerates the mode collapse into a far right ethnonationalist society.

From the more mainstream Palestinian side (such as there is), I think escalation now is motivated by the ongoing legitimization of Israel in the rest of the Arab world. They don't have much time left for this silliness.

Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages?

I strongly doubt people actually follow this moralistic approach to war, or it is always profoundly hypocritical. No sane person ever took sides in the Karabakh conflict aside from the respective diasporas, simply because the people involved are both identical and irrelevant (and equally unpleasant) from our perspective; with Israel-Palestine there is a much stronger ingroup-outgroup dynamic, so it’s more comparable to Russia-Ukraine, in which I don’t believe any atrocity, real or imagined, would force any kind of self-reflection.

No sane person ever took sides in the Karabakh conflict aside from the respective diasporas, simply because the people involved are both identical and irrelevant

Not exactly. Armenians can at least point to their Christian history as a commonality and to the World War One-era genocide as something that many well-read Westerners have heard of. I'd guess that maybe 15% of Americans could immediately point to Armenia on a map of the world without help. When it comes to Azerbaijan, I would guess that it is more like 5%.

Also, probably because most countries never viewed Karabakh to be part of Armenia to begin with, because of Armenia's historical ties to Russia, and because Azerbaijan won both recent wars pretty quickly, Armenia did not benefit from anything even remotely approaching the amount of Western media PR that Ukraine has been getting.

I think the difference is that the Azerbaijanis aren’t really typecasted as Islamists, the first line of the Wikipedia page on Religion in Azerbaijan says “Azerbaijan is considered the most secular country in the Muslim world”, most elites don’t wear hijab etc. It’s clear to any observer that it’s a relatively run of the mill territorial conflict for that part of the world, Azerbaijan is a corrupt petrostate but Islam isn’t relevant and so it avoids the West vs Islam culture war conflict even as desperate Armenian boosters try to claim it as such.

Really? I'd personally think far more people would be able to identify Azerbaijan vs Armenia on a world map. Azerbaijan has the benefit of having a pointy bit sticking out into the Caspian (very memorable and easily identifiable) while Armenia really doesn't have much going for it, I'd imagine lots of people would confuse it for Georgia.

I can’t believe that you of all people are so wildly overestimating the geographical knowledge of the American populace.

Oh, I didn't mean like 30% of the American populace would be able to identify Azerbaijan, it was more like thinking 2% would be able to point to Armenia and get it right on the first try, while something like 5% would be able to do the same with Azerbaijan, my claim was (%age who get AZ correct) > (%age who get AM correct).

Besides, I never said I think the American population is uniquely dumb compared to the rest of the world, they're smarter if anything averaged over the whole rest of the world, it's more that I think modern western culture is what is bad. The hardware of westerners is fine (well, as fine as an average human's hardware can be), it's the software that's borked.

And while a true ethnic cleansing is not out of the question, more realistically they'll simply permanently occupy Gaza and turn it into an actual open air prison, whether after the hostages are recovered or after the stream of atrocities decreases the public tolerance for giving in to hostage tactics.

7 million Jews trying to occupy 2.3 million Arabs is a tall order. That's a slightly worse ratio than 140 million Russians trying to occupy 40 million Ukrainians, plus Gaza Arabs are younger and raised in an atmosphere of antisemitism that literally spans generations. I don't think setting up a permanent military occupation can work, back when Israel left Gaza in 2005 it was twice as small.

Suffice to say I believe those concerns are not insurmountable. If the goal of the occupation is not integration of Gaza but simply killing all fighting age men who try to coordinate on anything that resembles Hamas activity or dealing with Iranians – a few tens of thousands plus tons of networked drones, facial recognition checkpoints, shooting everyone masked etc etc. will work adequately. Plus taller walls, better turrets.

This isn't 2005.

It's obviously a challenging task, but I think Israel will ultimately conclude there is no better alternative. Walling off Gaza and shooting down their rockets hasn't worked. Occupying the West Bank, mostly, has worked.

Hamas the best Palestinian ruling party that Israeli hawks could have had

Maybe, but I think that it is not the best Palestinian ruling party that Israel could have had. If Israel does become a far right ethnonationalist society, I think that a lot of its most intelligent people will simply move away from there and it will lose many of the advantages that it previously had relative to its enemies. And, since from what I understand Jews outside of Israel tend to increasingly intermarry a lot, this could actually destroy Jews' entire cultural/genetic advantage over gentiles which they have enjoyed for the last ~200 years as Jews get increasingly assimilated by the much huger populations of non-Jews around them.

Indeed, I think that part of this could happen even Israel does not become a far right ethnonationalist society but Israel's enemies simply somehow manage to hit it with rocket attacks a bit more frequently and regularly than they have managed to do up to this point. Highly skilled people like engineers and scientists can move elsewhere and some of the ones who are less patriotic than the rest would do so in such a scenario.

Israel will weather a minor slump in growth rate just fine and can afford to continue truncation selection on loyalty. The gravitation holding it together (fear of annihilation by gentiles plus feeling of racial, spiritual, essential distinctiveness) cannot be negated by anything so petty as a bunch of disloyal white collar workers scurrying away. Given local Jewish TFR, in a generation those turncoats will be more than adequately replaced by children of those who stayed anyway.

I am merely channeling the sentiment I observe among very level-headed, secular Israelis today – ML professors, staunch liberals, witty SSC readers. A great many of them will accept ethnic cleansing or genocide of Palestinians as a solution; perhaps will participate if a chance presents itself. Israel no longer gives a fuck about Western libshit routines where patriotism is supposed to be definitionally antithetical to intellectualism; it's traversing the path that the West has renounced in the 20th century.

A great many of them will accept ethnic cleansing or genocide of Palestinians as a solution; perhaps will participate if a chance presents itself

Israel would be welcome to try and it would fail. These same "liberals" would also find themselves the targets of Islamic radicals in the West doing revenge attacks for months if not years. Given their embrace of genocidal rhetoric, I certainly wouldn't shed a tear for them.

Islamist attacks in the West (even narrowly targeted at Jews) won’t create more sympathy for the Palestinian cause but the opposite.

What can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

Nothing, especially as Hamas was smart enough to take dozens of hostages. Bibi was dumb enough to say "we're at war" when in reality it was a limited cross-border raid that affected the immediate vicinity border communities. A war would entail something like the 1967 or 1973 wars which were existential. This clearly is nothing even remotely similar. This miscategorisation has now boxed him in rhetorically and he can't be seen as backing down. It would have been better if he called it what it is: a major terrorist attack/raid.

In terms of propaganda, it seems clear that international opinion is (and should be) with Israel. But what I'm seeing from Israeli military experts is that this is being described as Israel's 9/11. It was a massive intelligence and military failure on their part and once the initial shock dies down, people will be starting to ask hard questions of the govt. So there will be a political angle to ramp up a massive response which may not be effective in the long run but needed to save the govt from its downfall.

Israel is now a very wealthy society and appetite for large-scale casualties which a major ground operation would necessarily require is very low. While you could do a lot of bombings which would level entire neighborhoods, you'd also risk killing your own hostages. It's really a gigantic failure on the part of Israel. I don't really see any good option for them. Gaza is this problem that they can't seem to solve and govt advisors have talked about "mowing the lawn" in the past, as you'd need to continually launch mini operations to degrade the militants' capabilities without actually solving anything at a root level.

I think this ties into Israel's larger failure of solving the issue with the West Bank situation. The left's "land for peace" formula is dead but the right-wing's continued settlement expansion invariably leads to ethnic tension. Bibi used to be good at "managing the crisis" which allowed the mainstream of Israeli society to sort of forget that there ever was an unresolved issue. This year has seen as a huge uptick in terrorist attacks and now this latest Gaza crisis just compounds the issue.

In a very weird way, Israel is safer externally than it has ever been from invasions from other Arab countries with Saudi normalisation on the tangible horizon adding to the Abraham Accords. On the other hand, the internal situation keeps deteriorating and not just between Moslems and Jews but even between religious and secular Jews. Seems like the place is just a perpetual cauldron of unrest.

This was sort of my reading of what Hamas's goal is - do a very visible strike that lays bare the hollowness of Israel's invulnerable image (which is also, for instance, a basis for a lot of Israel's weapons trade), try to hunker down and weather the inevitable response, and once it dies down allow Israel to destabilize itself in internal recriminations.

Of course, Israelis also probably know that Hamas might want something like this, which would increase willingness to go the whole hog in attacking Gaza and Hamas so as to not allow them a win...

Nothing, especially as Hamas was smart enough to take dozens of hostages

First - don't underestimate the willingness of Israel to pay the butcher's bill. Second - there is always the Russian approach.

Instead, the KGB kidnapped a man they knew to be a close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before dispatching the unfortunate kinsman with a bullet in the brain.

In addition to presenting him with this grisly proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives also advised the Hezbollah leader that they knew the indentities of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately.

I am sure that Israel could outbid the Palestinians from Hamas on pointed extreme cruelty. And don't forget that half the country has Slavic roots. We can be very savage and cruel when push comes to shove.

Yes, there are no good options for Israel with Gaza. The “best” solution would be to occupy and pacify it wholly, but it would be extraordinarily expensive, extremely bloody and would make relations with the Arab world worse. What they have always wanted to do is give it ot Egypt or even anothe Arab country, but of course nobody wants them, partially because it would be ‘surrender’ and partially because they’re 2m people with zero human capital and a high birthrate in a time of high youth unemployment etc etc.

Bibi is right. Israel has an image of deadly effective military and the initial attack has bloodied that image.

So he needs to respond with overwhelming force to restore the image.

It isn’t about the particulars here but the next invasion.

UK news front pages for today.

In general, Arab violence toward Israel since 9/11 inevitably codes to Westerners’ experiences of Islamist terrorism (or, in parts of Europe, migrant crime waves by Muslim young men) in their own countries. Residual sympathy with Palestinians (which people forget was strong enough in the 70s, 80s and 90s for many mainstream European politicians to openly defend or at least carry water for PLO etc terrorism) is evaporating.

Even in the Muslim world, refugee crises and the intensification of the Sunni-Shia conflict have changed political realities. Many Turks, particularly hardcore nationalists, are now more anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian than ever. The old adage that the Arab world could never allow maximum brutality towards the Palestinians because their own people would revolt seems to be weakening, the Saudis are fighting a brutal war in Yemen that requires similarly cruel methods and in which they may (depending on who you believe) be extensively supported by Israel.

It likely won’t be this month or this year, but the conditions are slowly emerging for Israel to be able to take much harsher action with relative impunity.

You are ignoring the counter-forces in action such as the rapidly diminishing power of Jewish organizations in the West and their willingness to support Israel, and the post-modern Marxist inspired ideological upheaval in Western politics which has the potential to take a very anti-Israel turn. It is perhaps the last remaining Western colonial state. White South Africans were a lot less extreme in their oppression and they were still forced to give up their colony.

Also small bit regarding your observation of pro-Israel young Turks. It is real but it is mainly an extremely-online person phenomenon. Organized secular opposition is and has always been strongly pro-Palestinian[1] and made statements to such effect yesterday as well. Indeed, now there is a strange situation with Erdogan being the only major political actor who stuck to a "both sides do bad" type of statement instead.

[1] The leadership of the opposition in 2018 https://www.aa.com.tr/uploads/userFiles/79121245-49cb-4f77-bd45-d9d308a833b3/09_2018%2F09_mayis%2F04%2F20180515_2_30378555_33752608.jpg

/images/16967568391366947.webp

How are you defining colonial state?

Something like: A state founded by a group of colonizers who moved en masse to an alien area and implemented their political rule with little to no regard for the local population. Of course by this definition there would be a lot of colonial states but I believe Israel is unique today in the sense that the colonizer population created almost zero ties with the locals (unlike the Spanish/Portuguese colonies) but also didn't achieve absolute population majority (like most Anglo colonies)

In general, Arab violence toward Israel since 9/11 inevitably codes to Westerners’ experiences of Islamist terrorism

You are forgetting that the neocon wars are the major source of migrants and muslim immigration to Europe. Israel has been pressing migrants into Europe. Palestinians want arabs to stay in their homeland, Israel wants millions of them to become refugees. The nationalist right in Europe has been pro stable states in the middle east. The less people want islamic terrorism the less they will support neocon policies that swamp Europe with migrants.

Meanwhile there is a growing muslim population that is completely pro Palestine and young people in the west no longer see Israel as victims. Israel is not at all popular in Europe and there is little pointing to increasing support.

It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.

That's probably how this will be remembered / talked about going forward, but discussion/forecasting regarding a third infatada has been increasing over the last year. It's just been overshadowed in the western media due to the war in Ukraine / focus on Israeli politics.

This is more operational surprise than strategic surprise. Iranian arms shipments to groups across the region hasn't exactly been a secret.

The tactical surprise is the relishing in brutality against civilians that's been part of the operation, including the raid shelter killings that have already been publicized. That sort of thing isn't intended to communicate valorous resistance to garner international solidarity, that's the sort of thing intended to provoke reactions expected to overshadow the initial atrocities in public memory.

For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

Given that anything they do would be accused of being a war crime or ethnic cleansing regardless, that's probably not the deterring question it would have been a day ago. Especially given multiple examples of large-scale ethnic cleansing in the last year, and even in the last month, that so far have not exactly manifested any coordinated international response.

That's not to say Israel could get away with it- the gaza strip has an estimated 2 million people, which is almost as many as Armenia the country proper (2.7 million) and the middle east is not the global commons at all- nor is it to say Israel should even try, but it's not exactly the taboo guaranteed a universal response.

As for what Israel will do... I suspect that's going to depend on what Hezbollah does, and more importantly what Iran wants to happen. Hamas isn't quite the proxy that Hezbollah is, but I would be amazed if Hamas conducted this without significant pre-launch coordination with Iran.

including the raid shelter killings that have already been publicized.

God those videos are extremely brutal. Such videos should (but we all know they won't) convince everyone that the side of peace and kindness and treating other human beings well and general "stuff westerners say they like" here is Israel, not Palestine. If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting. Sure they are discriminatory etc., but the alternative is not Nordic style welfare democracy, it's literal Hamas, and compared to them, Israel are the good guys.

If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting.

What's Israel's record with ME peace again? Annexing land off their neighbours, invading their neighbours, 'pre-emptively' bombing their neighbours? Something like 80-90% of Middle East interstate wars involved Israel, there was only Iran-Iraq and Gulf War 1 without Israeli involvement.

We shouldn't be supporting anyone in the Middle East who isn't going to give us something in return, this is a them problem. Supporting Israel causes us many problems: massive terror attacks, Arab oil embargoes and quagmire wars.

I think it’s possible for individuals to express statements of moral approval toward the methods Israel will need to deploy in this scenario, while also opposing any material support being transferred from Western countries to the IDF. I want Israel to handle this situation entirely on its own, and I want it to win. Do you believe that these desires are incompatible?

If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting.

It's kind of ambiguous what he means here but I interpreted it as material support. Moral support alone can't achieve peace in the Middle East.

Your position is very clear.

Such videos should (but we all know they won't) convince everyone that the side of peace and kindness and treating other human beings well and general "stuff westerners say they like" here is Israel, not Palestine. If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting. Sure they are discriminatory etc., but the alternative is not Nordic style welfare democracy, it's literal Hamas, and compared to them, Israel are the good guys.

Now apply this reasoning to Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria, Chechnya… Could it be that your idea of what Westerners (certainly their rulers) like is wrong?

The moral superiority of non-Whites is a foundational principle of Western civilization at this point. The only reason Israel even gets away with thus much is because it’s only partially European.

God those videos are extremely brutal.

I'm probably going to regret this, but do you have a link?

As always, rdrama to the rescue:

Main thread: https://rdrama.net/post/209674/redlight-israel-is-in-a-state

There are links to videos in the post. Further stuff in the comments. To save you a click here's a comment (by user @Awoo) with some links (more can be found on the full post/comments):

https://rdrama.net/post/209674/redlight-israel-is-in-a-state/5121370#context

PEOPLE ARE GETTING BUTCHERED.

GRAPHIC LINKS:

HTTPS://NITTER.NET/JENGELMAYER/STATUS/1710525434285138223

HTTPS://NITTER.NET/BRYANLEIBFL/STATUS/1710532424529007062

HTTPS://NITTER.NET/OZRAELIAVI/STATUS/1710535510798880786

HEADS UP, THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY PRETTY BAD

HTTPS://NITTER.NET/SDFRONTTWIT/STATUS/1710535742739603661

TRANS LIVES MATTER

Last one is footage of the dead in a shelter.

If you want everything as soon as it comes out watchpeopledie.co is where you want to go (full gore warning).

Damn. You weren't joking. That one dude twitching...

Twitter is an insane place right now, but it will only get worse from here. Just now, I scrolled past two gruesome videos, then saw tweets from official Israel military accounts. and then a video supposedly of someone hang gliding from Gaza into Israel?? The Ukraine war was not like this, I feel like I will be scarred by this one.

Speaking of retribution, Netanyahu’s twitter says, emphasis mine:

Since this morning, the State of Israel has been at war. Our first objective is to clear out the hostile forces that infiltrated our territory and restore the security and quiet to the communities that have been attacked.

The second objective, at the same time, is to exact an immense price from the enemy, within the Gaza Strip as well. The third objective is to reinforce other fronts so that nobody should mistakenly join this war.

We are at war. In war, one needs to be level-headed. I call on all citizens of Israel to unite in order to achieve our highest goal – victory in the war.

https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1710631847879717236?s=20

Some of the footage from Ukraine was really grim, especially the videos of drones finishing off wounded soldiers.

yes, not denying that. But those are less shocking than naked dead women being paraded around and spat on

Not really? I watched redditors on /r/dronedOrc gloat about a surrendering man being torn apart by shrapnel bombs because he was still alive after the 4th one and they loved watching him writhe in pain.

He was grovelling for his life. Surrendering is a different process and doesn’t look like that
he didn’t start begging for mercy til AFTER he realized his number was up. expect mercy hahaha
Your jazz hands won't save you now.
Leave him to a slow death.
I got hard.
Could literally watch this for hours
I don’t care how brutal it is, I absolutely love watching Russians getting killed.

Spitting on a dead body is nowhere near as grotesque as watching that from what you used to think were civilized humans that speak the same language as you.

The difference is that some angry Estonian who hates Russia trolling in an online comments section is a lot less visceral than literal video footage of the raped corpse of an Israel civilian paraded through Gaza to civilian cheers. Ukraine doesn’t parade desecrated corpses of Russian civilians through Kiev to cheers.

Also, there is difference between gloating about dead enemy soldiers and gloating about dead raped civilians.

When I was a kid I watched some militants saw the head off a captured NGO worker with a blunt knife. I'm pretty inured to bronze-age savages doing terrible things while spasmodically yelling ALLAH AKBAR.

What still gets me a little is the university HR lady, who'd fire you for making the white supremacist thumbs-up gesture or mentioning the lynching word "picnic", suddenly become a maoist third-worlder screaming about how Stolen Land Will Be Cleansed With The Blood Of The Settlers, From Palestine To California!

Does that short clip of a female corpse in underwear in a truck with Palestinian soldiers sitting over it make such a huge difference to you? Or are you referring to some other video?

that and crowd yelling as they parade the corpses and people spitting on the corpses; women and children dead after house to house killing; killing a thai worker and trying to chop his dead off using the bluntest farming hoe while shouting “allahu akbar”. I just didnt see this from Ukraine I guess.

Yeah there’s a lot of grim video out there, although history suggests nobody should be surprised given the depths of the hatred on the Arab side.

I agree, and Im not naive. But reading about something like this happening in a book, vs see this live, is very very different.

the yom kippur war was 50 years ago to the day, and the IDF gets caught with its pants down again like this? netanyahu and his entire government's days are numbered.

On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

Branded by whom? Amnesty - their job is to brand any fart as human rights violation so they should be ignored. The same way you should ignore Kandi on what is racism. By the arab world - Saudi and UAE are buddies and their elites don't really care about palestinians. Egypt mostly dont care also, Syria is having its own problems. EU - maybe - but look at amnesty. UN - there will be veto from USA and probably from Russia. So they can do anything. They can always use the US doctrine - every man past puberty caught in a rocket strike is declared enemy combatant.

Unfortunately ethnic cleansing is one of the only stable solutions. Make Palestinians citizens and you will be looking in bloodier Lebanon 30 years down the road. And no one wants nuclear warheads in country busy with a civil war anyway. The other is to find a country that will give them passports. But egypt probably won't be too keen, Jordan would probably like a mediterranean port - but I don't see how a land bridge could be made.

I think this kind of desperate attack was inevitable for some time now. Big intelligence failure on Israel’s part but very high birthrates and the fact Gaza is a hellhole (partially by design) mean the requisite large numbers of angry young men are present. With the number that just walked in there will inevitably be cases of families being slaughtered, girls raped and so on to occupy the press for months.

And it explains why the Israeli population lurches to the right. Americans were unfathomably bloodthirsty after 9/11 (see infamous Coulter quote) outside of fringe far-left contrarians; in Israel, this has been going on for 70 years (and 20 in the current phase), the public is radicalizing year by year and has got a long time. Even in Europe the migrant crime wave that led to a surge in support for the AfD etc is less visceral compared to what’s happened in Israel, Swedes don’t fear an actually organized, well equipped army of young men raiding their quaint towns and slaughtering them like pillagers in the thirty years war.

As to what they’ll do, I think bellicose rhetoric is more likely than something more serious. The only real “solution” would be to slaughter the violent young men (same as it always is) to break the spirit of the population, firstborn sons to start, maybe. Or go full Xinjiang, possibly. But they can’t afford that and don’t really want to, you’re right, so instead they’ll build bigger walls, do some more bombing, talk tough and try to forget about it.

Gaza is many terrible things, but a state of slavery isn't one of them.

No, as the isolated nature of Gaza is a consequence of the Gaza-stirp Palestinians, and specifically Hamas, ability to manage their relations with Egypt (who manage a border) and even the West Bank Palestinians (who were a major political force for enabling cross-Palestinian transit concessions from Israel), not solely Israel.

The lack of willingness of Arab states to hold / give refuge / assimilate Palestinians is a broader Palestinian failure, but one that far predates Hamas.

The lack of willingness of Arab states to hold / give refuge / assimilate Palestinians is a broader Palestinian failure, but one that far predates Hamas.

I mean attempted coups by Palestinian refugees in their host countries (and massacring Israeli Olympic athletes by the same group) certainly didn't help.

As the saying goes, they've never missed and opportunity to miss an opportunity. And hijack a few more airliners worth of opportunities along the way.

I'm ambivalent towards the Jews and Muslims both, but I don't see how this war will benefit anyone at all. Just another mess.

The most common guess is that Hamas saw Israel and Saudi Arabia normalizing relations and felt that they needed to kick the wasp’s nest to prevent that from happening.

I'm deeply suspicious of both too. Blasphemy and Israel are incredibly volatile topics for Muslims, I'm certainly not happy that someone's poked the bear yet again. Perhaps maybe possibly as these incidents pile up, we'll build the wall on our borders after all. Or at the very least, admit that multiculturalism is a failure and brown people probably have to become "coconuts" to fully assimilate in western societies.

The bigger questions I have come down to

  1. What is Hamas plan here? They had to know they can’t militarily match Israel and Israel is going to hit very hard back. The only thing that could do is pull in another backer but I think most of the world is going to let Israel do as they please

  2. This operation seemed too complex for Hamas alone. Which basically points towards Iran and then Russia through Iran. I can’t figure out if more conflicts is good or bad for Russia. I think potentially bad.

In the western world I would think this greatly helps the right. Trumps got easy bulletin board material with Bidens recent Iran deal. I have to think it helps anti-immigration views in Europe, I can’t understand why they would want to import these people into there society.

What is Hamas plan here? They had to know they can’t militarily match Israel and Israel is going to hit very hard back

So what? Israel is already hitting hard constantly. What is the average life expectancy of Hamas militants or even anyone high up in the hierarchy? These people very much already know that they and their whole family will be obliterated with a precision guided bomb at some point with a very high probability. They do what they do because they believe the moral dignity and the eventual triumph of their people are more important than their personal well-being. How many of the gunmen who participated in the raid yesterday really expected to survive the day?

Palestinians have good reason to believe they will be destroyed as a people if they give up but there is also no immediate action that can bring them victory in the foreseeable future. They have developed institutions and traditions to deal with this grim reality. It is more akin to a death cult than a normal society as we would understand it, but it is what it is.

So what? Israel is already hitting hard constantly. What is the average life expectancy of Hamas militants or even anyone high up in the hierarchy?

This argument amounts to "if you're too good at defense, you are not permitted to attack". The fact that Hamas is often bad at killing Israelis, and therefore doesn't decrease their lifespan as much, and the fact that Israel is often good at killing Hamas, and therefore does decrease their lifespan, shouldn't affect whether it's okay to fight them.

There's a common double standard which amounts to "you have to give your enemy a fighting chance". War is not like that; if Hamas dies fast, tough. It's not a reason to stop..

I don't think you understood my point. I am not making the argument you are supposing me to be making. The discussion wasn't about Israeli actions but Hamas motivations.

I saw 5k Palestinian deaths in the last decade. Of a population of 5 million. It’s hyperbole to say that’s significantly reducing their life span. And I would assume a great deal of them are military casualties.

What is Hamas plan here?

They don't necessarily have a rational plan in place. Sometimes people just go to war for emotional reasons. I mean, despite ~80 years having passed and thousands of historians having looked into the question, there is still no consensus on why Hitler decided to continue the invasion of Poland after the UK and France gave him an "if you don't stop we will declare war" ultimatum on September 3, 1939. In retrospect it is clear that Germany had little or no hope of forcing the UK out of the war and that it would have had to hope for the UK to just get tired of fighting. And generally any strategy that has no way to force your opponents to give up but instead relies on hoping that your opponents decide to sue for peace is a bad strategy! And this should have been rationally clear to the Germans in 1939 given their lack of a navy even close to challenging the UK one or any reason to be convinced that their air force would be able to defeat the UK one. But for whatever reason, Hitler kept going. Politicians are not chess-playing computers, they are human beings who have emotions.

This operation seemed too complex for Hamas alone.

Iran does help them but I'm not convinced that Hamas absolutely needed their help to pull this off. From what I can tell, this Hamas operation was a classic light mounted infantry (in this case mounted on cars and trucks) raid that required secrecy, speed, and willingness to take risks but not necessarily much coordination or sophistication. Basically they just needed to 1) have good reason to believe that the Israeli defenses were vulnerable in certain places, 2) tell all of the commanders to just push as much as possible as fast as possible, and 3) keep the planning secret.

It reminds me of the Prigozhin advance on Moscow. There are many conspiracy theories that swirl to try to explain why he had such an easy time of it, but the simplest explanation is that his opponents were just caught with their pants down and his forces moved really fast.

and then Russia through Iran

I can't think of any good benefit that Russia would get by antagonizing Israel. The last few years Russia has been trying to be pretty neutral to Israel by, for example, supporting Assad yet not trying to stop the Israelis from bombing his forces. Although to be fair, the latter can maybe in part be explained by the simple fact that Russian forces in Syria, being geographically cut off from Russia by unfriendly and neutral countries and by oceans dominated by NATO, could not realistically withstand a serious land attack.

Edit: After watching more videos, for example https://twitter.com/LocalFocus1/status/1710995658092458048, I'm somewhat upping how sophisticated I think this was. For example, in that video I see what to me look like drones dropping expolosives onto some kind of surveillance towers. Not that this in itself necessarily takes much sophistication, but coordinating the timing between doing it and attacking the actual wall, and making sure that the soldiers follow the schedule, requires good organizational skill and discipline.

It reminds me of the Prigozhin advance on Moscow. There are many conspiracy theories that swirl to try to explain why he had such an easy time of it, but the simplest explanation is that his opponents were just caught with their pants down and his forces moved really fast.

I play a series of Real Time Strategy games called Wargame. It is based on the cold war, NATO vs Warsaw Pact. Lots of fun. Yes, it's just a video game, but after seeing experienced players used combined arms over thousands of hours, you learn something about tactics and the failures of human nature.

After many many hours I've seen this type of strategy play out time and again. Occasionally someone will organise an impromptu Thunder Run or more specifically an attack largely formed of fast moving motorised ground elements. (where motorised is very loosely used. Achmed and his mates in the back of a Toyota Corolla speeding down the highway with AK74's would work. No need to even have a Technical)

It just works. It shouldn't, but it does. Defense networks just can't react that quickly to scenarios that haven't already had countermeasures emplaced. There aren't enough QRF's for this type of thing on a large scale. People skilled at defense don't have the resources for every scenario, so oddball bum's rushes are far more successful than they have any right to be.

Thoughts like 'surely someone would have thought about this and put something in place' are very often wrong. Once the dust has settled in Israel, I'm sure these strategies will be patched, only for new ones to take their place the next time Gaza flares up.

Yes I came to the conclusion it had sophistication earlier.

On Russia I’m not sure if this benefits them. The theory is more instability elsewhere weakens the west and distracts us. Overwhelms our decision making process. They’ve long tried to do things like this which does include the 2016 election interference which didn’t have a huge effect electorally but did launch distrust between American tribes.

There are at least a moderate number of Jews still affiliated with the wider Russian security apparatus and kleptocracy, it seems unlikely to me that this was Russia.

Iranians are a large and moderately intelligent people (I think IQ estimates are substantially underestimated) with a relatively stable state and a large public university system with a focus on engineering and tech. It’s definitely possible that it was just them. Even in the West quite a few eg. ML professors and so on are Iranians.

What is Hamas plan here?

Hope Israel bombs a hospital that is 12 feet from their mortars and collect NGO money from the sky.

I’m on record as being a squish on the JQ, and by extension the IQ (Israel Question), relative to other users here who share some of my other political commitments. Yes, I’m aware of many of the most damning conspiracy theories about Israel’s skulduggery when it comes to its relationship with American foreign policy, and I even think many of them are 100% true. I have no illusions about Israel, or at least Israel’s leadership, as a genuine friend of the American or European people. I don’t want American boots on the ground to intervene in this crisis.

That being said, my approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict has always been “which side is more similar to me, and to people like me?” There’s no world in which the answer is the Palestinians. We can argue for eternity about whether or not Jews are white, whether Israel is a Western country, whether it’s in the best interests of people who care about the future of the West to strategically undermine Israel, etc., but compared to a bunch of dirt-poor third-world Arabs, it’s no contest. I want to see Israel embrace cruelty and brutality in a way that we have not seen any industrialized modern democracy do in 60 years, and I want it to be an example to the world of the kind of mindset that European and Anglosphere countries absolutely must emulate in the years to come. The world is about to become a far more savage place, and maybe the fact that Israel has always spiritually had one foot in the West and one foot in the Middle East means that it will have to be the first one to tear off that scab.

That being said, my approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict has always been “which side is more similar to me, and to people like me?” There’s no world in which the answer is the Palestinians.

I want it to be an example to the world of the kind of mindset that European and Anglosphere countries absolutely must emulate in the years to come.

Sure but they already do this. This is the only time Palestinian-Israeli casualties have been even remotely even (at least in confirmed casualties +prisoners rn). A pretty devastating blow to IDF prestige. Most of the time it's the Israelis kicking a lame dog with a steel-toed boot. Since founding, Israel's expanded territorially, ripping bits off other states and Palestine. They've already kicked loads of Palestinians out of Israel.

If you want real lessons in brutality, look to China. They had a little outbreak of terrorism in Xinjiang... and absolutely dropped the hammer. They suppressed so intensely they've basically wiped out an entire culture in 5-6 years. Only old men go to the mosque these days, it's all over. Extremely disciplined use of overwhelming state power, they nipped it in the bud rather than reacting, complete victory. Makes Israel look like a joke.

There are so many details about the treatment of Xinjiang and the Uighurs that even seasoned China watchers of the high quality kind don’t know, like it’s insane how successful they’ve been in keeping things quiet; my guess is even Western intelligence doesn’t know many details. It’s hard to say how effective it is in that context. Yes, the Chinese have effectively repressed them, but other Central Asian countries have been very effective at limiting terrorism within their borders (mainly by allowing Islamists to leave, but still) and have used far less repressive methods. Comparing the situation to Palestinians 1:1 isn’t simple, it’s possible China would be facing a much worse security crisis if the Uighurs were as radicalized as Gazans.

Uighurs simply don't have a large group of people in other countries who see them as genuine kin the way Palestinians do. Their radicalization was a brief episode that had to do with limited monetary/weapon/ideological support by US/UK/Turkish intelligence services. In contrast there are about 500 million Arabs (situated in a way that absolutely surrounds Israel, and in command of armies and money and influence). Vast majority see Palestine as the pinnacle of their people's humiliation. The darkest spot on their battered honor which they highly value.

The comparison to Uighurs is quite useless because of this. China was subjugating a people who were barely militant, had little real friends, with zero real threats against its own national security as a consequence of these actions.

Also, if the power disparity weren't so enormous.

Most of the time it's the Israelis kicking a lame dog with a steel-toed boot

More like a lame dog with rabies, which can occasionally get a nip in when Mossad is sleeping on the job.

It seems that most of the West, and thus by extension, Israel (public relations work both ways) has a lower tolerance for the kind of performative and effective brutality needed to squash this for good.

If I was a soldier who just had my nose broken with a rock thrown by a bunch of kids who would be better off in school, well, I probably wouldn't shoot them right away, but that little shit would learn his place fast.

The only reason they haven't been beaten to a pulp is because Israel successfully contains them, and through technology mitigates shit like ghetto rockets being launched indiscriminately at their population centers.

The problem is that Israel is a major source of migrants. The Israeli state has expanded forcing millions of Arabs out of their homes. When they bombed Lebanon in 2006 I got some new classmates in Sweden. Israel has been a major force acting to destabilize the middle east and create chaos. This means migrants to Europe. Meanwhile Israel has been busy promoting multiculturalism in Europe. Israel has been fighting Syria for decades and there are now vast numbers of Syrian refugees in the world.

The best option for Europe is stable secure arab states. Israel wants to expand and wants dysfunctional failed arab states. The blowback from that means Europe gets another wave of migrants that Israaid can help bring into Europe through their activities on Greece's beaches.

The last thing I want to see is the world get more destroyed and more migrants flood into Europe because of zionists. If there is a step one to saving Europe, it is ending the pro Israel neocon agenda that has been a root cause of migrants. I don't want to meet more people with heroin addictions and missing family members after neocon Americans decided that they wanted to go on another mass murder spree in the middle east.

What we need now is to speak the language they understand- pushback. Palestinians have shown great courage and resolve today when they fought back. The same neocons who made billions bombing Afghanistan while working class whites died of heroin lost dozens of vehicles. The same neocon/zionist establishment who flooded Syria with weapons and my neighbourhood with people who fled from them got humiliated today. Aggression is in their nature, they will only stop once they get properly bitten back.

When they bombed Lebanon in 2006 I got some new classmates in Sweden The best option for Europe is stable secure arab states.

Snipers on Turkey-greece and turkey - bulgaria borders and drones that ram boats are also effective. Europe should just grow some balls.

The last thing I want to see is the world get more destroyed and more migrants flood into Europe because of zionists.

At this point,so many migrants are flooding in from so many other places (arguably Europe's own fault in some cases like when they got rid of Gaddhafi) I doubt it will make more than a marginal difference. Europe is either going to change policy to stem that flow (probably by not accepting irregular migrants at all) or I doubt some more Arabs matter.

I recall reading that Israel also tried to push its African asylum seekers into the West and then there was HIAS' role in the Syrian refugee crisis.

I am generally speaking more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians but I think many Westerners are wildly overstating how much in common we have with the Israelis, at least the part of Israel that is ascendant.

What do mass migrant flows from countries like Niger, Senegal and Haiti have to do with Israel? Even if you conflate progressive Jews in some Western countries with Israeli policy, the surge in global migration since the 1990s has much more to do with ease of travel, birth rates, stagnation in the global south, rising temperatures and various other intractable factors than it does with Jews or Israel.

Funny how most of the migrants have come from wars against Israels enemies brought about by radical Israel firsters. Israel has promoted massimmigration extensively through NGOs such the jewish internet defence force and israaid while actively working to destabilize countries in the middle east.

You didn't really address the above post, unless you are saying that Isreal is responsible for civil wars and general unrest in countries in Sub-saharan Africa. Why would they do such a thing?

I never said they were soley responsible. I said they have been a main factor. WIth that said israaid is helping them accross the Mediterranean while Israel NGOs are actively pushing for diversity in Europe. Also most of the refugees have come from wars in the middle east pushed by pro zionist neocons. Israel is actively destabalizing Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Syria which is an absolute disaster for Europe.

The problem is that Israel is a major source of migrants

This was somewhat true in the past, but I think it is already rather outdated. The Arab population pyramid is already leveling off. The vast majority of third world low quality immigration into Europe will come from Africa in this century.

The vast number of migrants that have come have come from "we love Israel" neocons. Strange how Israel gets an ethnostate while they push for diversity in Europe. They level Palestinian villages to build settlements while they finance migrant smuggling to Europe.

Israel has created an enormous problem for Europe while being no benefit.

If massive immigration is inevitable will Israel take massive african immigration?

"Once the bitter enemies of everything me and mine have won their war, consolidated power, and successfully eliminated their main vulnerability and point of criticism, I'll be in a stronger position."

What a braindead take. Reminds me of comments I sometimes see where some 19yo white girl on some university campus somewhere writes that she has more in common with the son of goat herders than her conservative neighbor (b/c they vote for the right political party). If total war broke out and Hamas won tomorrow, in the "years to come" it won't be their grandsons and daughters writing op-eds in the Times about how the ever shrinking white population have become even more Nazi-like.

If Hamas and Hezbollah win tomorrow and Israel is overrun, firstly American Jews will still be in America and secondly nothing about mass immigration into Europe and the West in general will change.

I don’t see Israel, or the Jewish people, as the long-term enemy of my people. I see reconciliation between gentile whites and Jews as an absolutely necessary part of the destiny of the white race. I think we can recognize that in the short term Israel is a malignant actor, and still believe that what they are holding back is even worse. I look at it the same way I look at Japan in the 1940’s: it was a genuinely anti-white force, and it saw its participation in the war as explicitly anti-colonial. If you’d asked an American in 1944 whether Japan was an inevitable racial enemy of white American, he would obviously have said yes. (Polling of Americans at the time revealed that a large majority wanted the Japanese population totally exterminated.) In the fullness of time, though, Japan ended up taking very well to Western culture and becoming a highly beneficial contributor to the Western world order. Jews have in the past made undeniably positive contributions to Western history, and they inevitably will again in the future. Arabs never will.

Polling of Americans at the time revealed that a large majority wanted the Japanese population totally exterminated.

This is blatantly wrong. The actual figure is 13%. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3023943.

You are correct, I severely misremembered that result. I appreciate the correction.

Agreed! If you look at the religious side of things, Jews are the original People of the Book. They should be respected for that fact alone.

The Jewish religious tradition that birthed the Old Testament of the Bible acts as the fundamental moral, spiritual, and societal framework for the entire Western order. And frankly at this point much of the world. Their contributions made whiteness as a thing even possible, in that their religion birthed the religion that made whiteness such a force to be reckoned with.

I'm not a white identitarian, but I'm baffled as to why so many of your fellow travelers can't take the longer view on Jews and Judaism. Thanks for the reasonable take.

in that their religion birthed the religion that made whiteness such a force to be reckoned with.

It isn't like it took Christianity to make the Romans a "force to be reckoned with", so I don't think your claim here is actually correct. Ever seen the Arch of Titus?

Ever seen the Arch of Titus?

Can you really say that the Romans managed to subjugate Judea? In the short term I agree, but in the long run Judea and its ideas became suzerain over the entirety of the Roman empire (or whatever remained of it).

Can you really say that the Romans managed to subjugate Judea?

In the short term yes, and that's what matters for the purpose of this analysis - they were very clearly a formidable power well before Christianity. Even looking at the bible, they don't hide the fact that the Romans were in charge of the area at the time. I am honestly unsure as to the long run consequences, however. I'd honestly want to see the counterfactual world where Rome actually subjugated the jews and Christianity never happened - but that world is so different to ours that I find it hard to talk sensibly about it.

I don’t see Israel, or the Jewish people, as the long-term enemy of my people.

You should consider that the reverse is true, especially among the more religious hardliners which are growing in influence in Israel. They spit on Christian pilgrims in the streets, they could murder them for that matter, and those Christians will never accept them as a long-term enemy. But that's ultimately because Christian religion has completely blinded them and they are totally incapable of rationally interpreting the relationship between themselves and the Jews.

I don't blame you for wanting this to be true, but my question is what exactly do you perceive as entailing "reconciliation" between Aryan and Jew, a sibling rivalry that is biblical and mythically embodied in the brothers Jacob and Esau. The Jews view themselves as sons of Jacob and you as the son of Esau. Does your idea of reconciliation rely on this changing fundamentally? I don't think you appreciate how deeply this is baked into the cake of the Jewish religion.

Because they will say that they want nothing more than reconciliation between Jew and Aryan. And their conception of "reconciliation" is the suppression and erasure of Aryan racial consciousness and advocacy coincided with bloodthirsty support for the Jewish ethno-state. I assume that you mean something different by "reconciliation", something akin to reciprocity. Imagine if Jews vocally and materially supported the interests of White people to the extent White people support Jewish nationalism. If that's your idea of reconciliation, I would be interested to see how, when, and why you think these attitudes changing are plausible.

I think you also underestimate the capacity for self-deception and cognitive dissonance. Let's say Israel determines the Final Solution to the Palestinian Question is forced deportation. That is not going to open the minds of Europeans in any degree, they are just going to accept simultaneously that this is necessary for Israel but even proposing a similar measure for African migrants is an evil, jail-worthy suggestion.

Advocating forced deportation for migrants isn’t jail worthy in Europe, it’s mainstream on the right. That they fail to implement it is another problem, but they’re not banned from saying it.

This was ages ago (around the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis) but there was a couple that dinged by a court for posting something like "all they bring is sorrow, conflict, and [a bunch of other negative things]" on Facebook. It wasn't as dry as "illegal immigrants should be deported" (a tautology), but it was extremely mild as far anti-migrant rhetoric goes, and the judge explicitly said if they caught posting something like that again, they'll go directly to prison.if they get caught posting something like this again.

I'm talking about the children of those migrants 50 years from now. Israel would be deporting natives from their indigenous region, but that isn't going to open up the minds of Europeans into deporting the next generation of non-Europeans in Europe. They are just going to accept a different set of standards for the Chosen than themselves as they are doing right now.

Israel can’t deport the Arabs from Gaza. They’ve spent 50 years trying to and the Arab population has increased by more than 400%. That is because, exactly as European countries are finding and will find out, nobody wants them.

Israel can’t deport the Arabs from Gaza. They’ve spent 50 years trying to and the Arab population has increased by more than 400%. That is because, exactly as European countries are finding and will find out, nobody wants them.

Europe didn't want its Syrian refugees either, what the European people want doesn't matter. I think it is completely possible that Europe is forced to accept the migration of millions of refugees on behalf of Israel, and people like Hoffmeister will continue to hold out hope on "reconciliation" and belief that Aryans must rely on the Jews to survive. It's already happened so far with millions of Arab refugees, why wouldn't it happen again?

I see reconciliation between gentile whites and Jews as an absolutely necessary part of the destiny of the white race.

You're so wrong it literally pains me in my bones.

Come on. You really ought to at least say why you think so.

They'll probably interbreed till it's a distinction without a difference*

*AI timelines excluded.

Low effort. Spell out your objection or don't bother telling people "No, you're just wrong."

Oh yeah, let me describe in detail the absolute necessity of reconciliation with Jews for the destiny of the white race. A group of people with an extreme representation of thinkers and political figures responsible for everything that is wrong with white western societies as they exist with their current modern memeplexes. That sentence coming out some one who's supposed to be pro-white. At a certain point you need to call bullshit to pure trolling.

At a certain point you need to call bullshit to pure trolling.

I’m not trolling. I sincerely believe that the DR is severely - and, in some cases, intentionally - overestimating the centrality of Jews in the constellation of problems facing our people. As I have said before, “The JQ is not a yes-or-no question.” I can recognize the significance of Jewish power without inflating it beyond what is actually supported by the evidence. You can say I’m delusional and profoundly naïve, and maybe I am! But I’m sincerely expressing my own position on the issue.

At a certain point you need to call bullshit to pure trolling.

No, you don't. You need to articulate why you think someone is wrong, decline to engage, or use the report button if you genuinely think someone is trolling.

I'm not taking your side or @Hoffmeister25's side, I'm telling you that no matter how super-obviously-painfully-stupidly wrong someone is, in this place you explain why you think they are wrong if you want to argue with them, you don't just "Nuh uh" them.

Any real white nationalist with 2 braincells to rub together will be in favor of whatever it is that needs to take Israel down.

I'm not so optimistic. Israel will likely get a free pass on savagery in popular opinion while all other countries continue to be gentled into submission.

For optics reasons, I’m going to be intentionally vague about what precisely I’m imagining.

If optics was your goal, you would have left that sentence out altogether.

Optics are a spectrum, and this was as far along that spectrum as I was willing to publicly go. You’re correct that I could have gone less far, but I also could have gone farther, but didn’t.

A statement like:

the kind of mindset that European and Anglosphere countries absolutely must emulate in the years to come

has the effect of riling people up, and not being specific about why this mindset is necessary allows the speaker to evade questions he does not wish to answer. That does not fit the ethos of this forum. We are not called TheBailey.

I've always appreciated your posts, even though I don't share your motivations, because I like clear thinking and rational debate. I don't object to anyone advancing provocative claims, as long as they give others a fair opportunity to rebut. Your statement was provocative, but it was too vague for someone to argue against.

Right, there have been multiple times in the last month when I have begun to type out a far more clear explication of specific steps which I think need to be taken - the Lampedusa stuff in particular has stirred up some especially visceral reactions in me - but ultimately I’ve deleted all of them. I’ve said before that one of my goals when posting here is to soften people’s perceptions of white identitarians; to show that at least some of us are normal and reasonably well-adjusted people, able to clearly articulate arguments and to joke around and act like human beings. To show that we’re not just hate-filled, bloodthirsty, atavistic monsters.

This goal is sometimes at odds with the fact that there are certain problems which almost certainly will require violent and cruel behavior, and I fear that the time is rapidly approaching when such solutions will become urgently necessary. Explicitly advocating for such an approach, though, is counterproductive to my optical goals. Pretending to disavow such an approach, though, would be dishonest - especially when we’re discussing a very graphic and high-profile textbook example of precisely the sort of problem that would require that type of solution.

This leaves me in the uncomfortable and suboptimal position of having to pull some punches and to occasionally lack clarity. I’m perfectly willing to speak plainly and to pontificate at length about most subjects, but when it comes to discussing violence - particularly against identifiable ethnic groups - I do find that I have to walk a finer line.

Everyone here is going to be doxxed, author fingerprinting is inevitable. It’s not about that, it’s about propriety and decorum.

Almost nobody has no data online in the training set. People use social media, post on LinkedIn, upload their masters thesis, are listed as co-authors of a public pdf written by their company (a research report, a presentation, a journal article, a corporate report, technical documentation), have a high school essay posted to the school district website etc. Especially if you’re the kind of smart-ish person who posts here. Obviously some people have nothing, and that makes it easier (although fingerprinting can still also tie together disparate online identities, making doxxing by incidental detail easier, even if it doesn’t directly link to writing under your real name) to avoid this fate. Most aren’t so lucky.

Yeah, the total erosion of any sort of privacy is one of the hardest blackpills to swallow for me when it comes to new AI.

We gain unimaginable wealth if successful, but we will lose so much in the bargain.

If I'm doxxed, I'm going to join the screenshot circulating of a Hindu Nationalist twitter/insta user called "Adolf Hitler" posting a meme promising eternal friendship between Indians the Jews.

It would be hilarious, if nothing else.

Edit: https://x.com/empireenjoyer10/status/1710710501901033979?s=20

"What did you think Indo-Aryan meant, my brother?" --Adolf Hitler (probably)

I'm a few shades off from ideal, though my brother could pass.

I do think I'd look cool in Hugo Boss though, and that's got to count for something right?

How do y'all suppose Israel was so blindsided? An operation of thousands of people and Mossad etc had no clue it was coming? Smells a bit off

I mean weapons of mass destruction weren't found in Iraq. I think intelligence agencies of all stripes have a hubris that enables blind spots. Combine that with human error, and I think negligence (less than diligence) and misestimation is the correct interpretation. If these security agencies only have their failures recorded, not counting the near misses and unreported intelligence successes, the wrong interpretation would be to draw conclusions from their failures as the only evidence. The CIA didn't do 9/11, and similarly this failure of Mossad I think can be judged similarly.

There's basically always been an operation consisting of thousands of people looming just over the horizon, for more than a decade prior. Getting a few thousand guys together to cross the border and wreak havoc isn't much of a challenge, particularly given the very small size of Gaza and the distributed storage and management of weaponry across individual Hamas members - sending a few kids on foot or on bikes to spread the word on impending assault destinations and times is very easy, everyone mostly brings weapons they already had been given weeks/months/years ago for just such an event, and if the groups and destinations are determined even a little in advance then there's practically nothing left to do but go. I wouldn't be surprised if operations of that scale could be called up in a few hours, even factoring in planning time. And as others in the thread have noted, even well-prepared defenders can get caught with their pants down if the enemy makes an unexpected-enough move, so most of the ground-level chaos was caused while the IDF was still figuring out what was even happening.

What raises eyebrows is the size of the stockpiles of weapons, particularly the thousands of rockets launched out of Gaza on the day of the assault. Stuff that blows up doesn't tend to last long in Gaza, and the IDF regularly conducts operations to clear out ammo warehouses. Either they've somehow systematically missed thousands of stockpiled rockets over several years, implying Hamas has been unusually effective at keeping them out of sight over a prolonged period with many changing leaders... or a whole ton of rockets arrived at once from some sponsor, and were smuggled in on very short order by unknown means. I'd bet money on the latter.

My point is, it's entirely possible that a single well-exploited mistake allowing rockets to be smuggled into Gaza by the thousands was the difference between havoc and status quo for Israel this week. Right now, I don't think we can realistically conclude much about the competence of Mossad or western intelligence from single catastrophes, other than "they aren't perfect"; though I expect in the coming weeks we'll see lots more narratives and fingerpointing as Israel tries to understand how this happened and how to prevent it in the future. I definitely don't think there's any need to reach for conspiracy to explain the magnitude of the event, either; it's a sufficient, but hardly necessary, explanation to yield this outcome, and right now there's enough grieving people seeking retribution against someone as an emotional relief valve that basically any publicly visible conspiracy investigation is unquestionably compromised by emotion.

My best guess is, Hamas and Iran pulled a single good trick on Israel, and this sort of disaster was always one bad day away.

The best thing Israel could do for the Palestinian people is to straight up occupy Gaza and the West Bank and declare them to be parts of Israel and their inhabitants citizens. Then punish the attackers as common violent criminals.

Also this really doesn't look good for Mossad. I expected better from them...

Why would they make them citizens where they can have a vote? That would be suicide. It would be strategically preferable to leave them stateless.

Why would they make them citizens where they can have a vote?

This can be seen as much a problem with democracy as it is a problem with the Palestinian people. Besides, Israeli democracy is going to have huge issues with the Haredim throwing around their demographic weight in a few decade's time, creating a few million more Israeli Arabs who are never going to vote for the same parties as the Haredim will delay their takeover for a generation at least by diluting the vote share of these people (Israels Proportional Representation system means extreme Arab votes counteract extreme Haredim votes when it comes to coalition building, ensuring moderates continue to hold the reins of power).

It's like killing two birds with one stone, you get to destroy the attackers self justification of being freedom fighters and brand them as being nothing more than the basest (note: not the same as basedest) violent criminals, denying them of a glorious death in battle with the enemy (which they and their families would happily take) and leaving them to rot in prison, and on the other hand you delay the demographic tsunami of your own ultra-orthodox elements overwhelming your system.

Fighting a government that gives you a vote doesn’t necessarily stop you from calling yourself a freedom fighter. Ireland’s vote for Sinn Féin in the 1918 UK General Election and the subsequent war it legitimized comes to mind.

It looks like what Palestinians decided to do in response will have many people say "the Israelis are the good guys here, at least they'll just bomb the women and children instead of selling them to sex slavery".

Or it seems based on the Twitter videos the Palestinians are raping the women, then killing them, and then parading around their naked bodies.

Considering the amount of sex slaves and their history in Israel I'd advise the JIDF to pick a different thing.

What are you talking about?

Exactly what I wrote? Israel used to be a prolific place for sex trafficking and slavery. But they changed their tune in the late 90's after a US DoS Trafficking in Persons report ranked them as Tier 3. Meaning Israel was then in a group of nations that could face sanctions for the abysmal state of their country.

Should Palestinians in Gaza just forget the last 18 years and the thousands men, women and children bombed to death?

Yes, yes they should. It sucks but there is no alternative. Israel is too far advanced and strong now compared to the Palestinians, end of story. The time to compete was 50 years ago, and the way to compete was not rockets and bullets but rather a singular focus on economic growth to the point where your soft power grew so much you could influence the players that really matter (lets be honest here, both Palestine and Israel are too small to influence the world by themselves) to put extreme pressure on Israel because they wanted to trade with you (which is what Israel is doing now to the Palestinians, see the proposed normalization of relations with parts of the Arab world).

Violence no longer works on large scales in the 21st century (see Russia v Ukraine) if you want to create a peaceful country and prosperity for your people. The only reason it works for Israel doing the reverse is that the Palestinians are much weaker (to the point that it's no longer two equals fighting - which leads to a lot of damage to the world; but more like police subjugating a riot - minimal damage to the world if the police handle it right), and because Israeli economic heft will mean other countries turn a blind eye to what is going on, were Palestine to try the same, they would rightfully be sanctioned into the ground. Until Hamas understands this the very people they want to help will suffer even more than they would in a counterfactual world where Hamas suddenly disappeared off the face of this planet.

Even if Hamas wants to take the fight to Israel physically, the way to do it is not through the sticks and stones tier rockets but rather through diverting economic resources into high end military research to make yourself a plausible equal of Israel in the domain, and then threaten them (this is never going to happen, but it's still the right way to do things if you choose this path).

The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them. If anything tech is helping Palestine. We have seen cheap drones that are mass produced take out an Israeli tank today. With every Palestinian having a cell phone and most of the middle east on social media it has become harder for Israel to brutally suppress Palestinians. Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations. The Palestinians are increasing in numbers and fighting an ongoing insurgency at home is cancerous for a society. Furthermore, Israel is already deeply split between conservatives, an extremely woke portion of jews and sectarian fundamentalists that are breeding at a high rate.

The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them.

Eh. The Taliban 'defeated' NATO by being a thorn in their side until NATO decided the juice wasnt worth the squeeze and bailed. That would not work for Palestinians. Suppressing an agressive Palestine isn't a side project for Israel, it's existential. You'd better believe that if Afghanistan were in the middle of the Mohave desert and rocketed Phoenix every decade or so the US would still be there.

Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations.

That might have been true yesterday but a few viral videos of Israelis getting executed and lynched by Palestinians will turn global perception of the Israeli-Palestine conflict around right quick.

The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them

Except that the Taliban didn't defeat them, right? The Taliban managed to kill all of 2000 US troops in 20 years, and they succeeded only after US troops left. I don't think the IDF is going to be leaving Israel any time soon.

That is called losing the battles but winning the war.

The US could absolutely have won in Afghanistan if it was willing to accept extreme civilian casualties, wipe out villages etc. The reality of an occupation is that if you have fuel, food and resources, mostly you really can just kill people until a population is pacified. It would have worked even in Chechnya, Putin just didn’t have the guts.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Putin was doing that in Chechnya, it was just cheaper and easier to give Ramzan Kadyrov what he needed to pay off a sufficient portion of the chechens to establish total control in exchange for loyalty.

Pacifying Chechnya was difficult and extremely costly. There are twice as many Palestinians as Chechnyas and they have phones. Russians at least weren't continuously filmed during their operation. Israel has falling support in the polls and going full Chechnya won't improve that.

So far they seem to be using their phones mostly to publicize their own atrocities.

That depends if it is filtered through American media. I am mainly getting Israeli bombings, beatings of Palestinians and attacks.

If Israel kills every palestinian tomorrow, in 5 years all will be forgotten. The half assed genocides get remembered. The full one don't.

That's basically one of only three stable solutions, too. The second one is the Palestinians kill all the Jews, the third is the Jews all go somewhere else far away.

The Palestinian diaspora extends beyond Israel/West Bank/Gaza, though.

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The more India rises as a power and the more Islamic immigration to Europe continues to cause integration issues, the more every non-Muslim country will support Israeli brutality against Arabs.

This makes no sense. Israel wants millions of Arabs to move from where they currently live. Palestinians want Arabs to continue to live in the same place as their family always lived in. Supporting Israel is supporting mass muslim immigration to Europe. Israel has sponsored migration into Europe while destabalizing the middle east. If we don't want massive arab immigration to Europe than not forcefully resettling millions of Palestinians is a good plan. One of the main critiques of neoconservative policies in the middle east has been massive amounts of migrants into Europe. It is also almost impossible to repatriate muslims to Palestine today as Israel blocks it. Palestine meanwhile wants Europe to return migrants.

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A lost war is never worth it. And Gaza can't win.

What do they get from this? Do they stop Israel from taking land? Of course not. It's just blood and misery for nothing.

A lost war is never worth it.

Truer words... does this apply to other current events though?

In Ukraine both sides are losing. It is unclear which is losing faster. They are competing on this metric.

Of course. Honestly, Ukraine might end up with even the winner worse off for fighting it.

Granted that Israel treats Palestine pretty badly, there’s not a lot Palestine can do about it. This is a real ‘the strong do what they will and the weak put up with what they must’ situation.

This would result in the Palestinian people losing their homeland forever. A one-state solution would mean the eventual replacement of all Palestinians because of Israel’s soft privileging of Jews and the extreme birth rates of the Hasidim. Given that the Palestinians seem earnestly to value their culture and peoplehood, this simply isn’t viable.

Israel is running into the problem France had in Algeria and the whites had in South Africa. Once the minority becomes too numerous they can't be controlled. Had there been a million Iraqis the US would have won. With a booming population they simply couldn't. France controlled Algeria relatively well when their population was small. With the economic benefits of being a part of France their population boomed and it just became impossible for France to police that many Algerians. Apartheid South Africa would have been hard to maintain with a 4% white population. The Palestinian population is increasing rapidly and is getting to the size where counter insurgency is hard.

The difference is that in South Africa both groups were in the same country and the white minority very deliberately refused to retreat to the Cape (where they could have engineered a permanent white majority) and cede the rest of the country to the majority.

In Israel, the domestic Arabs have been largely pacified. The non-citizens in the West Bank and Gaza are the risk.

Palestinian birth rates are decreasing, whereas Israel’s is stable + 20% have extremely high birth rates which will overshadow Palestine in 60 years

Palestine has a younger population and a high birth rate. That religious fundamentalists with unimpressive average Iqs and dysfunctional ways of living are reproducing at a high rate is a problem for Israel, not a feature.

Do the Chareidim have unimpressive IQs? By 2019, Jewish fertility exceeded Arab fertility in Israel.

The Haredi have an average IQ above 110. In fact there’s an above single digit chance that the literal smartest person in the world is sitting in an Israeli housing project arguing about what counts as cheese for the purpose of Jewish dietary laws.

The super genius jews myth doesn't really seem to apply in Israel. Their Pisa scores are below average and their average Iq is less than a hundred. The Haredi have shown little in terms of intellectual achievement.

Because lots of Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi and the Haredi don’t want intellectual achievement.

Palestinians also seem to earnestly value the destruction of Israel.

I don't know how this all ends (if it ever does), but I wouldn't bet on everyone getting an outcome they're happy with.

Seems to me like they already lost. It's now just a debate over the shape of the final peace.

The best thing Israel could do for the Palestinian people is to straight up occupy Gaza and the West Bank and declare them to be parts of Israel and their inhabitants citizens

RIP Israel. This will be the end of the state. Much better idea is to talk with Egypt to annex it and move them somewhere beyond the Aswan dam

They’d gladly give Gaza to Egypt but the Egyptians obviously don’t want them.

I don’t know, I think that the time has come for them to decide: is Israel a democracy or not? If they want to continue down the pathway to become an apartheid theocratic state, then that’s their business but they should be called out for it or and shouldn’t continue to receive foreign policy deference and foreign aid in abundance. If they are going to remain a democracy that is excellent, and I believe will ultimately be revealed as the correct choice.

Israel is democracy. Which is orthogonal to how religion shapes their society. And how is Israel apartheid state. I often seen it mention, but never explained. South Africa wanted to subjugate the blacks. Israel wants the palestinians gone from their land (choose whichever their suits your political side). They have absolutely no interest in administering or even exploiting them.

They are now, but this nonsense about either deporting all of the Palestinians or maintaining a status quo in which the palestians are not Israeli citizens is basically a form of apartheid


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