naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
People compare Hamas to Nazis.
That's not fair.
Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong.
(...) If you do not support Israel & the Jews, you are literally worse than the Nazis.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis?
Who could be responsible for this state of affairs?
The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise.
Comparisons can be made with various colonies...
Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
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Notes -
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
Not the great argument Shemer thinks it is.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis? Who could be responsible for this state of affairs? The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise. Comparisons can be made with various colonies... Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
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That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
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