site banner

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.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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 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.