naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
28858 thread views
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.
If you mean morally: What would you do if you stood to lose everything? Not just your life, not just your family, not just money, but the ultimate goal for which your entire life and your movement struggled? If decision makers far away, who don't care about you and won't listen to you if you talk to them, are about to make choices that will forever foreclose the dream that you have dedicated your life to making a reality? What wouldn't you do in the struggle for the most important thing in the world?
Saudi Arabia was about to normalize relations with Israel, Iran might have gotten a fresh Peace Deal and stopped funding for Palestinian militias. Those two events would have been the absolute death knell for the Palestinian cause, it's not clear where they go from there. The goal of this action in the medium term isn't to achieve a just peace, it is to prevent the creation of a permanent and unjust peace. The only tool Hamas had to reach decision makers in SA and Iran was the sympathy of their populations, to obtain that they needed the Israelis to commit atrocities. And not just the garden variety bulldozings and arrests that we've all grown unfortunately rather used to, something dreadful and spectacular. Which brings us to...
If you mean strategically: Israel is now doing exactly what Hamas intended for them to do. Don't be under the impression that Hamas' plan was for Israel to surrender, or that they expected Israel to take this lying down and just let Gaza alone. Hamas' leadership absolutely intended to have all of this happen. Their goal was for Israel to do exactly what Israel is now doing. They wanted Israel to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, and they don't care about civilian casualties on their own side. Hamas is preventing civilians from fleeing the fighting, they want civilians to suffer. This upcoming fight was their goal all along.
And now they have "tough-minded" Israelis and westerners patting themselves on the back about how smart they are for giving Hamas what they wanted. On this very forum, numerous posters argue that the invasion is the smart strategy, that only a fool wouldn't invade Gaza under these circumstances. The only way they were going to achieve such a blow that Israel would not merely fall into their intended trap, but rush into it, that Israelis would openly congratulate themselves for "finally meeting tit with tat."
Leaving the steelman aside, I don't know that any of that means this war is going to work out "well" for Hamas. The fortunes of war are always a gamble, and world public opinion is fickle and built on the actions of people far outside of Hamas' control. But it is meaningful that all actors are now dancing to Hamas' tune, doing what Hamas intended them to do. Consider this comment below from @Chrisprattalpharaptr in context. This is Israel's 9/11, and they are reacting as such, there is literally no one in the USA today who defends what we did after 9/11 as wise or well considered. I'm not sure the hijackers or their masters are better off for it, but the USA is certainly worse off. I suspect a similar outcome here: Hamas might not win, but Israel will certainly lose.
I am pro-Israeli here, but I can easily steelman this. Yes, what Hamas did was your cookie-cutter attempt at ethnic cleansing. You see, the way ethnic cleansing works is to do horrible shit to women, children and elderly and then proudly shout that from the rooftops. If you instill enough fear in the opposing ethnicity, they will vacate the premises on their own.
This is how it was done by Israelis themselves in 1948, they massacred the village of Deir Yassin and then run around literally broadcasting to rest of Arabs that they are next. By the way the extremist Israeli militia that participated in Deir Yassin massacre called Irgun was led by Menachim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel who called the massacre as "splendid act of conquest".
There are numerous other examples of successful ethnic cleansing. I can mentioned the Operation Storm during Balkan Wars in 1990s, where Croats ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory with tacit approval of western coalition, the international tribunal even rubberstamped that it was actually not ethnic cleansing despite hundreds of thousands Serbs being effectively expelled. The formula was the same: run in, massacre anybody who refused to leave: mostly infirm, children, elderly etc. Then just enjoy wailing of their wives running before you, as they are just cheap but very authentic signal booster for those Serbs who did not get the message so far to run on the double. And now you have nice ethnically cleansed Croatia, part of EU and Eurozone, full of nice beaches and good food prepared by former soldiers that participated in the operation, with main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing - general Ante Gotovina - considered as national hero.
Another successful ethnic cleansing is that of Germans after WW2, nobody now gives a shit about atrocities they experienced in East Prussia, currently Russian enclave or that they were expelled from Poland because Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers to the west, which included German cities, or Czechoslovakia when Germans lived there for literally centuries. Nobody gives a shit about those Germans now, there is no wound on the soul of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians, this is the reality now and they will live happily ever after - until they themselves are ethnically cleansed sometimes in the future possibly.
As the last example I present the genocide of a tribe living on Catham Islands called Moriori. They had unique pacifist culture of nonviolence that was able to survive in isolation. That is until they got in contact with Māori people in 1835 - in paradox of history Māori themselves were the Moriori ancestors. Long story short, imagine slavery and genocide with the last descendand of the culture died in 1933, around 100 years after contact with Māori. Again, nobody gives a shit about Moriori, because there is now literally nobody to give a shit about, they are history complete with their unworkable pacifist culture. And Māori are now respected minority of New Zaeland complete with land rights recognition and all that.
And I think I will also close with another last example I ninjaedited here, that of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh as it is very pertinent to the topic at hand. This instance of ethnic cleansing was made possible because the main ally of Armenians - Russia - is unable to provide any assistance, but also because Azerbaijan now has a very good geopolitical situation as being key for non-Russian supply of energy to Europe, having good diplomatic ties to Turkey as their protector as well as being on the upswing economically. There are some performative declarations from the west, but nothing will be done on practical level.
So I guess my "steelman" is that this is the reality of human nature, this is how the world worked and will work in the future. If there is anything that needs any "steelamaning", it is this first principles morality and dream of multicultural peace loving society where the whole world is full of Moriori peoples singing kumbaya together. The reality is much more ugly and the fact is that ethnic cleansing was used and will be used in the future as solution of various conflicts. In a sense I think that the Hamas attack was a success to large extent, it shows that the support is shifting away from Israel. Europe is still dependent on energy from Arab countries, Germans recently signed 15 years long contract for LNG from Qatar, and guess who is one of the largest supporter of Hamas globally. Who knows, maybe in due time we will have the same situation as with Nagorno-Karabakh, which was also a long war until it wasn't.
I've seen the Moriori mentioned dozens of times by right-wing New Zealanders going "Guess those Māori aren't so great after all, huh?", so I'd guess one would encounter such comments inside New Zealand way more.
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
dr_analog 6mo ago
When your people have been oppressed by the enemy for 55 years they start to treat the yoke as normal, they forget what it means to be free. After all, it's not really an oppression when instead of soldiers bulldozing your farmhouse at night you get bureaucrats informing you your farmhouse violates the new safety zone requirements and has to be relocated. To remind them that they are people and not cattle you have to provoke the enemy into renewed brutality, and the only way to do it is by brutalizing the enemy.
When the plantation owner tells you, "I think we had an agreement about production quotas. It's the same on all plantations, so you can't say I am treating you unfairly. You have underdelivered, so I am forced to punish you, no hard feelings, right?" you don't organize a sit-in to renegotiate the number of lashes or the number of bales of cotton. You kill the enforcers and torch the mansion. Why would you also mutilate the sons, violate the wife and the daughters of the plantation owner in front of him before killing them? Do you really expect every other slaveowner to become so horrified by this that they release their slaves? No, they will become horrified by the atrocities and double down on the oppression, but that's your goal. The slaves have become too complacent. The indiscriminate punishments will remind them that the agreement they had with the owners was not an agreement at all.
Isn't it significantly different because the KKK is not an ethnic group? It's not even a village. There are no "civilian" KKK populations to blend in with, to get support from, to be hidden by.
Your country is perpetually blockaded by a neighboring country's government that doesn't want you to import anything without them first inspecting it. They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this. Therefore, you must attack them so hard that they beg for mercy.
(I'm sure there are other things Israel does to Gaza, but my understanding is that aside from imports, they do actually have sovereignty.)
They are a mostly peaceful group of activists who oppose the presence of black people in their community. They mostly hold marches which are mostly non-violent. They hide their faces for safety reasons.
Sometimes they burn crosses, sure, but you're the weird one for taking that as some kind of threat. After all, they're mostly peaceful. Only a small minority of Klan members are violent, and the ones who aren't violent.. well, they're not legally required to turn the ones who are violent in to the authorities, are they? You can't even prove they know anything about it! They could all be autonomous agents. The burden of proof is on you to prove there's coordination.
I wasn't actually asking you to steelman the KKK. I was pointing out that steelmanning is a bad thing to do here because that kind of steelmanning ignores the actual facts. It just isn't possible to honestly steelman Hamas or the KKK, any more than I could honestly steelman homeopathy or creationism.
They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this.
That's one of those things that's literally correct but misleading. They couldn't be persuaded by words, but they could be persuaded by Hamas stopping the rockets and terrorism, on top of some words.
This is precisely where rationality as an ethic fails.
There are lots of very good reasons to steal from, kill, maim, even genocide your fellow man. What stands in between us and horror cannot ever solely be reason.
Revenge at any cost needs no rationale, but supposing the leaders do have one:
There is no hope for the Palestinian cause so long as America is the hegemon. Therefore the only course of action is to maintain the cause alive until it falls. Therefore one must keep meeting the Israelis blow for blow and even provoke them to make sure they create enough despair in response that the movement stays alive until victory is possible.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
?
As far as I'm aware Native resistance took the form typical of tribal warfare. It wasn't anything special except for the fact that they eventually found themselves completely outmatched in a way they hadn't when fighting comparable Indian tribes.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
If the Apache wars happened in a modern urban setting, they would look a lot like this.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
The raids on civilians, mutilation of corpses, guerilla tactics and small independent parties leading coordinated raids are just regular plains Indian tactics that date back to tactics used by the original steppe people over 5000 years ago. These aren't unique to their conflicts with settled peoples. They used these same tactics against each other. The only thing unique is that the settled people had the power to force them onto reservations instead of just scattering them or forcing them into a tributary relationship, like the Chinese, Persians and Romans regularly did in Eurasia.
Of course none of this is new or specific to that particular. This is just irregular warfare against a threat with an immense technology and ressource advantage.
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Afghanistan, Vietnam... can't say for sure, but my impression is that most successful secessions resulted from a more advantaged power going "eh, it's not worth it", rather than the seceding one being able to withstand the full force of the who they're separating from.
Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
According to this article, Hamas has already partially succeeded in this endeavor.
After a bloody ground offensive with Palestinian deads in the tens of thousands, any Arab-Israel rapprochement will be probably off the table for at least a decade. And if Israel shows restraint, Hamas can blast that as a victory as well.
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Notes -
Is there a Hamas steelmanning available?
If you mean morally: What would you do if you stood to lose everything? Not just your life, not just your family, not just money, but the ultimate goal for which your entire life and your movement struggled? If decision makers far away, who don't care about you and won't listen to you if you talk to them, are about to make choices that will forever foreclose the dream that you have dedicated your life to making a reality? What wouldn't you do in the struggle for the most important thing in the world?
Saudi Arabia was about to normalize relations with Israel, Iran might have gotten a fresh Peace Deal and stopped funding for Palestinian militias. Those two events would have been the absolute death knell for the Palestinian cause, it's not clear where they go from there. The goal of this action in the medium term isn't to achieve a just peace, it is to prevent the creation of a permanent and unjust peace. The only tool Hamas had to reach decision makers in SA and Iran was the sympathy of their populations, to obtain that they needed the Israelis to commit atrocities. And not just the garden variety bulldozings and arrests that we've all grown unfortunately rather used to, something dreadful and spectacular. Which brings us to...
If you mean strategically: Israel is now doing exactly what Hamas intended for them to do. Don't be under the impression that Hamas' plan was for Israel to surrender, or that they expected Israel to take this lying down and just let Gaza alone. Hamas' leadership absolutely intended to have all of this happen. Their goal was for Israel to do exactly what Israel is now doing. They wanted Israel to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, and they don't care about civilian casualties on their own side. Hamas is preventing civilians from fleeing the fighting, they want civilians to suffer. This upcoming fight was their goal all along.
And now they have "tough-minded" Israelis and westerners patting themselves on the back about how smart they are for giving Hamas what they wanted. On this very forum, numerous posters argue that the invasion is the smart strategy, that only a fool wouldn't invade Gaza under these circumstances. The only way they were going to achieve such a blow that Israel would not merely fall into their intended trap, but rush into it, that Israelis would openly congratulate themselves for "finally meeting tit with tat."
Leaving the steelman aside, I don't know that any of that means this war is going to work out "well" for Hamas. The fortunes of war are always a gamble, and world public opinion is fickle and built on the actions of people far outside of Hamas' control. But it is meaningful that all actors are now dancing to Hamas' tune, doing what Hamas intended them to do. Consider this comment below from @Chrisprattalpharaptr in context. This is Israel's 9/11, and they are reacting as such, there is literally no one in the USA today who defends what we did after 9/11 as wise or well considered. I'm not sure the hijackers or their masters are better off for it, but the USA is certainly worse off. I suspect a similar outcome here: Hamas might not win, but Israel will certainly lose.
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I am pro-Israeli here, but I can easily steelman this. Yes, what Hamas did was your cookie-cutter attempt at ethnic cleansing. You see, the way ethnic cleansing works is to do horrible shit to women, children and elderly and then proudly shout that from the rooftops. If you instill enough fear in the opposing ethnicity, they will vacate the premises on their own.
This is how it was done by Israelis themselves in 1948, they massacred the village of Deir Yassin and then run around literally broadcasting to rest of Arabs that they are next. By the way the extremist Israeli militia that participated in Deir Yassin massacre called Irgun was led by Menachim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel who called the massacre as "splendid act of conquest".
There are numerous other examples of successful ethnic cleansing. I can mentioned the Operation Storm during Balkan Wars in 1990s, where Croats ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory with tacit approval of western coalition, the international tribunal even rubberstamped that it was actually not ethnic cleansing despite hundreds of thousands Serbs being effectively expelled. The formula was the same: run in, massacre anybody who refused to leave: mostly infirm, children, elderly etc. Then just enjoy wailing of their wives running before you, as they are just cheap but very authentic signal booster for those Serbs who did not get the message so far to run on the double. And now you have nice ethnically cleansed Croatia, part of EU and Eurozone, full of nice beaches and good food prepared by former soldiers that participated in the operation, with main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing - general Ante Gotovina - considered as national hero.
Another successful ethnic cleansing is that of Germans after WW2, nobody now gives a shit about atrocities they experienced in East Prussia, currently Russian enclave or that they were expelled from Poland because Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers to the west, which included German cities, or Czechoslovakia when Germans lived there for literally centuries. Nobody gives a shit about those Germans now, there is no wound on the soul of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians, this is the reality now and they will live happily ever after - until they themselves are ethnically cleansed sometimes in the future possibly.
As the last example I present the genocide of a tribe living on Catham Islands called Moriori. They had unique pacifist culture of nonviolence that was able to survive in isolation. That is until they got in contact with Māori people in 1835 - in paradox of history Māori themselves were the Moriori ancestors. Long story short, imagine slavery and genocide with the last descendand of the culture died in 1933, around 100 years after contact with Māori. Again, nobody gives a shit about Moriori, because there is now literally nobody to give a shit about, they are history complete with their unworkable pacifist culture. And Māori are now respected minority of New Zaeland complete with land rights recognition and all that.
And I think I will also close with another last example I ninjaedited here, that of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh as it is very pertinent to the topic at hand. This instance of ethnic cleansing was made possible because the main ally of Armenians - Russia - is unable to provide any assistance, but also because Azerbaijan now has a very good geopolitical situation as being key for non-Russian supply of energy to Europe, having good diplomatic ties to Turkey as their protector as well as being on the upswing economically. There are some performative declarations from the west, but nothing will be done on practical level.
So I guess my "steelman" is that this is the reality of human nature, this is how the world worked and will work in the future. If there is anything that needs any "steelamaning", it is this first principles morality and dream of multicultural peace loving society where the whole world is full of Moriori peoples singing kumbaya together. The reality is much more ugly and the fact is that ethnic cleansing was used and will be used in the future as solution of various conflicts. In a sense I think that the Hamas attack was a success to large extent, it shows that the support is shifting away from Israel. Europe is still dependent on energy from Arab countries, Germans recently signed 15 years long contract for LNG from Qatar, and guess who is one of the largest supporter of Hamas globally. Who knows, maybe in due time we will have the same situation as with Nagorno-Karabakh, which was also a long war until it wasn't.
I've seen the Moriori mentioned dozens of times by right-wing New Zealanders going "Guess those Māori aren't so great after all, huh?", so I'd guess one would encounter such comments inside New Zealand way more.
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
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When your people have been oppressed by the enemy for 55 years they start to treat the yoke as normal, they forget what it means to be free. After all, it's not really an oppression when instead of soldiers bulldozing your farmhouse at night you get bureaucrats informing you your farmhouse violates the new safety zone requirements and has to be relocated. To remind them that they are people and not cattle you have to provoke the enemy into renewed brutality, and the only way to do it is by brutalizing the enemy.
When the plantation owner tells you, "I think we had an agreement about production quotas. It's the same on all plantations, so you can't say I am treating you unfairly. You have underdelivered, so I am forced to punish you, no hard feelings, right?" you don't organize a sit-in to renegotiate the number of lashes or the number of bales of cotton. You kill the enforcers and torch the mansion. Why would you also mutilate the sons, violate the wife and the daughters of the plantation owner in front of him before killing them? Do you really expect every other slaveowner to become so horrified by this that they release their slaves? No, they will become horrified by the atrocities and double down on the oppression, but that's your goal. The slaves have become too complacent. The indiscriminate punishments will remind them that the agreement they had with the owners was not an agreement at all.
That reasoning would still apply for the KKK trying to attack someone in order to create anti-KKK backlash.
You're really grasping for straws here.
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Isn't it significantly different because the KKK is not an ethnic group? It's not even a village. There are no "civilian" KKK populations to blend in with, to get support from, to be hidden by.
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Your country is perpetually blockaded by a neighboring country's government that doesn't want you to import anything without them first inspecting it. They cannot be persuaded by words alone to stop doing this. Therefore, you must attack them so hard that they beg for mercy.
(I'm sure there are other things Israel does to Gaza, but my understanding is that aside from imports, they do actually have sovereignty.)
Can you steelman the KKK now?
They are a mostly peaceful group of activists who oppose the presence of black people in their community. They mostly hold marches which are mostly non-violent. They hide their faces for safety reasons.
Sometimes they burn crosses, sure, but you're the weird one for taking that as some kind of threat. After all, they're mostly peaceful. Only a small minority of Klan members are violent, and the ones who aren't violent.. well, they're not legally required to turn the ones who are violent in to the authorities, are they? You can't even prove they know anything about it! They could all be autonomous agents. The burden of proof is on you to prove there's coordination.
I wasn't actually asking you to steelman the KKK. I was pointing out that steelmanning is a bad thing to do here because that kind of steelmanning ignores the actual facts. It just isn't possible to honestly steelman Hamas or the KKK, any more than I could honestly steelman homeopathy or creationism.
Oh.
I mean, did I ignore the facts of the situation re: Hamas?
That's one of those things that's literally correct but misleading. They couldn't be persuaded by words, but they could be persuaded by Hamas stopping the rockets and terrorism, on top of some words.
Wasn't there a lengthy period without Hamas-organized terror attacks before this one?
No, they still kept shooting rockets to kill Israelis.
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I've often asked people not to steelman attacks.
I never expected I'd have to say it about literal physical attacks.
And why not?
This is precisely where rationality as an ethic fails.
There are lots of very good reasons to steal from, kill, maim, even genocide your fellow man. What stands in between us and horror cannot ever solely be reason.
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Only if you believe in Jihad and martyrdom. They’re not exactly rational.
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Revenge at any cost needs no rationale, but supposing the leaders do have one:
There is no hope for the Palestinian cause so long as America is the hegemon. Therefore the only course of action is to maintain the cause alive until it falls. Therefore one must keep meeting the Israelis blow for blow and even provoke them to make sure they create enough despair in response that the movement stays alive until victory is possible.
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
?
As far as I'm aware Native resistance took the form typical of tribal warfare. It wasn't anything special except for the fact that they eventually found themselves completely outmatched in a way they hadn't when fighting comparable Indian tribes.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
If the Apache wars happened in a modern urban setting, they would look a lot like this.
The raids on civilians, mutilation of corpses, guerilla tactics and small independent parties leading coordinated raids are just regular plains Indian tactics that date back to tactics used by the original steppe people over 5000 years ago. These aren't unique to their conflicts with settled peoples. They used these same tactics against each other. The only thing unique is that the settled people had the power to force them onto reservations instead of just scattering them or forcing them into a tributary relationship, like the Chinese, Persians and Romans regularly did in Eurasia.
Of course none of this is new or specific to that particular. This is just irregular warfare against a threat with an immense technology and ressource advantage.
Come to think of it, do we have examples of conflicts of that nature where the weaker belligerent actually won?
Afghanistan, Vietnam... can't say for sure, but my impression is that most successful secessions resulted from a more advantaged power going "eh, it's not worth it", rather than the seceding one being able to withstand the full force of the who they're separating from.
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Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
According to this article, Hamas has already partially succeeded in this endeavor.
After a bloody ground offensive with Palestinian deads in the tens of thousands, any Arab-Israel rapprochement will be probably off the table for at least a decade. And if Israel shows restraint, Hamas can blast that as a victory as well.
Mission accomplished for Hamas, I guess.
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This has of course to be considered in the light of the competing Saudi and Iranian interests.
Rapprochement was happening after all with the Abraham accords before these events.
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Surely that’s just the general Palestinian case + the case for terrorist tactics, both of which have been made elsewhere many times?
That's the general outline, but I'd like more specific arguments that pertain to the current situation, without either sanewashing or "look at these evil savages who burn babies alive for fun."* (*not an actual quote)
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