naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
[citation needed] that what Israel government is doing is worse than what Hamas doing, and more deserving sanctions/invasion.
i would not be surprised if this results in 10 000 + dollars per american, so you should be in support
That is a dumb reason to be in support, and expecting that such thing would be net financial gain is hilarious. Are you aware that Israel has nuclear weapons?
EDIT: author proposed to expel Jews from Israel and sell all their property. For some weird reason they implied that it would be a good idea, and that it would overall have profits.
[citation needed] that what Israel government is doing is worse than what Hamas doing, and more deserving sanctions/invasion.
I'm not that person but as of writing:
Palestinian dead: 3,785
Israeli dead: 1,300
So by that objective measure Israel has killed more and is therefore "worse," if killing is a problem worth condemning. And that ratio is sure to get worse. Surely some of those Palestinian dead are children and attractive under 40 women, if that helps. To put it more provocative (honest) and bluntly, Israelis/Jews are the more prolific merciless baby killers. They just objectively are.
I personally always keep that stat in mind whenever I see someone try to pull the "omg atrocities" sympathy card by counting bodies. A bizarre play for Israeli siders because the Palestinians will always have the Israelis beat in an oppression and body count olympics. It only really makes sense for Jewish chauvinists that genuinely believe a Jewish life is more valuable than a goy, but most that pull said card aren't so it remains bizarre to me.
how many Palestinians were killed by Hamas etc (with trollmode on: remember that 800 were claimed by Hamas to be killed in explosion that turned out to be clearly caused by faulty Palestinian rocket)
how many Israelis were killed by Israelis ?
how many dead Palestinians and Israeli are combatants?
And in my opinion deliberate murder of 1000 random civilians is much worse than 1000 civilians dying as collateral damage because terrorists setup weapon storage in apartment buildings.
It's just bait going to get someone to say it's bad to do that to Jews so he can cite to someone saying it's good to do to Arabs, then jerk himself off about Jewish conspiracies or something.
84wpmtyper's proposal was to expel all the Jews from Western countries while taking their wealth ("each American should get $10k from this!"), put them all in Israel, then cut off Israel from "all trade and cooperation" and have Iran deal with them. Basically an alternate, softened version of what the nazis did.
He has since private messaged me twice, claiming I misrepresented his post (I didn't), and that he fears for his life when he speaks out against the Jews. I'm assuming this is more bait.
I second the suggestion to ban 84wpmtyper if he carries on.
Assuming you're not outright trolling, a glance over your brief post history here suggests that you have not yet really grasped the spirit of the rules.
This is not the place to wage the culture wars; this is the place to discuss them with people who disagree with you. That means making your claims less-than-maximally-inflammatory, furnishing evidence in proportion to how inflammatory they are, speaking about specific rather than general groups, writing in a way that invites everyone to participate in the conversation, not building consensus or recruiting for a cause, and so on. Your post should evidence some measure of asking yourself "why do I believe what I believe" and "what would it take to change my mind?"
Yeah it's gone now. He (not sure if I should mention who it was) suggested that the West should expel all Jews, seizing their assets and concentrating them in Israel, cut them off from all trade and set Iran against them.
I see it now. When I first hopped into this thread, it just said "filtered"
And after reading it, it kinda made me want to reply in a way that may be skirting the rules. I almost think it's a false flag comment. That's how outside the overton window it is.
Might Turkey join the fight against Israel? Former US Colonel Douglas Macgregor thinks they might. Obviously this would be horrible for Israel, the US, and NATO. Does anyone understand what is happening in Turkey well enough to know if this is a possibility?
This is the same Macgregor that's been predicting Russian forces having free run of all Ukraine east of the Dniepr Real Soon Now for the entire duration of the war? The one whose consulting firm got casualty and death estimates wrong by a factor of (E: at least) four? The one who likes to plug gold?
Yeah I don't think his thoughts are worth much. Maybe as some kind of entropy source for a prototype AI tasked with writing movie plots?
General observation, not connected to Macgregor's current comments, but throughout the Ukraine War it has blown my mind how many of these pro-Russian pundits have been incredibly, flagrantly, continuously wrong in their predictions and continue to be cited by the cynical, oh-so-world-weary geopolitically aware independent thinkers again and again as if nothing had happened.
I'm actually a little surprised that someone hasn't tried to displace him to cash in on his silliness with an aggressive article like "Sit Down Mr Macgregor, It's Time to Stop Talking". Maybe there's enough grifting niches out there that there's no need to usurp an incumbent, just set up your own pitch next door? Maybe it's unexpectedly high risk and an attacker needs to build a network of allies before making an attempt? Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes - there was that one guy who became "the global expert on Moldbug", with more than enough material to discredit his theories, and he didn't make a move. Maybe it's easy to take someone down, but uncertain that you'll be the one to pick up the freed niche.
Presumably there's people willing to say a message - they may even believe it! - and people who want that message said, and a finite budget allocated to getting those things said. Or maybe there's a finite amount of attention in the world to hear the mess. In either case it seems like, assuming there's an equilibrium to disrupt by discrediting someone already in the ecosystem, there's money to be made. So why hasn't someone made a move? What are the dynamics of this grift economy?
Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes
this is one for me
Yes, I would spends weeks on writing down why specific pro-Russian idiot is wrong, maybe someone would read it, and then what?
Effort/benefit ratio is worse than for many others things can do, including watching funny videos of cats. Not to say about some things that I could do where I am already sort-of established in position of some (very minor) importance.
throughout the Ukraine War it has blown my mind how many of these pro-Russian pundits have been incredibly, flagrantly, continuously wrong in their predictions and continue to be cited by the cynical, oh-so-world-weary geopolitically aware independent thinkers again and again as if nothing had happened.
This has been how the constant "Russia is about to run out of money/missiles/vodka/conscripts" articles have read to me, too. I see people citing sources which claimed the Russians would have run out of materiel last year and people just don't seem to care that they were outputting unadulterated fiction not even a month ago.
Sure, that's stupid too, but the Western pro-Russians very specifically tend to pride themselves as independent thinkers who aren't just platitude-repeating NPCs like the "Reddit" pro-Ukrainians, so the incongruency tends to look bigger to me.
how many of these pro-Russian pundits have been incredibly, flagrantly, continuously wrong
In contrast to Bellendcat, which predicted Russia running out of PGMs for months in 2022. Or all the people who predicted this years's offensive would smash the Russians.
In general I'd say most of the people doing predictions on the war were absolutely off and kept at it.
It was Christo Grozev, speaking on UA Tv early in the war.
To be honest, it does seem nobody had a handle on Russian production. They 'run out' of stockpile by summer probably because it wasn't very good. Pentagon 'thought' they wouldn't be able to make new ones because 'sanctions' which turned out to be BS as they're still flying.
Of course, how many are fired, intercepted and hit is hard to say because in Ukraine, they'll arrest you for posting videos of damage on the ground.
We'll see later this year. Russia is unlikely to run out because especially cruise missiles are not very high tech. They use early 1990s electronics. If you have access to Alibaba, you can make all the cruise missiles for which you can get engines and aluminum and man-hours.
The atmosphere right now reminds me a lot of the post 9-11, war on terror vibes. The US is about to get dragged into some middle eastern conflicts by Israel. The propaganda parrots, "patriots", Zionists, and arm chair generals repulse me. The US is led by a geriatric imbecile, our economy is hanging on by a thread, our weapon and oil stockpiles are depleted, our reputation is dwindling and our allies are weak or disappearing. This will not end well for the US. Unfortunately, I think the train has left the station. I hope this will be worth it.
Personally, I think this is the end of Zionism. Public perception has changed and the propaganda doesn't work like it used to. Israel might actually get fucked now. I feel we are in for large societal and cultural changes, as well as a geopolitical reordering if not WW3.
The US is about to get dragged into some middle eastern conflicts by Israel.
Very unlikely. Biden got us out of Afghanistan which is something Bush, Obama, and Trump all should have done but failed to do. He also ensured no American troops got involved in Ukraine. It's very unlikely that he'll decide to go on a rampage in the Middle East.
our economy is hanging on by a thread
It's pretty much the strongest it's ever been. Unemployment is <4%. Stock markets are near all time highs. There's inflation, but that's cooled off significantly to being basically on-target.
our weapon and oil stockpiles are depleted
Not even close. Some factors (like artillery) that the US doesn't use much of are pretty low, but new shells are always being created. For most other things the US is the same as always since we're not sending them anywhere.
The SPR has little to do with domestic consumption of oil.
our reputation is dwindling
The opposite is true. It took a big hit after Iraq, then another moderate hit during Trump, but Biden + Ukraine have gone a ways to repairing it. The chorus of "America is an evil empire" is slowly being drowned out by "America isn't great but the alternative is so much worse".
our allies are weak or disappearing
Both Germany and Japan are rearming. Europe is weaker relatively speaking compared to history since it's been basically just living off its inheritance, but it still has a significant economic footprint.
Nothing except China's actions or a possible civil conflict in the USA would do much to change these things. Certainly not Israel, Palestine, or Iran.
Inflation is almost 4%. That’s double target and btw that’s 4% on a hit elevated base.
American consumer appears to be at a breaking point (as their credit is drying up). They decrease spending and earnings tumble. Earnings tumble and stocks tumble.
The employment numbers are heavily massaged. the Philly Fed had a piece in this that the numbers aren’t consistent. MoM there have been large unlikely beats (eg six sigma). That doesn’t happen naturally. It’s rigged via adjustments.
Inflation is almost 4%. That’s double target and btw that’s 4% on a hit elevated base.
Judging inflation by multiples of the target is goofy since the target is so low in numerical terms. E.g. one could say that in May of 2020 during Trump's tenure that inflation of 0.12% was off the mark by a factor of over 16x. That sounds disastrous and is technically true, but paints an obviously biased picture. A current inflation rate of 3.7 is basically fine since the long term trend has been downward given interest rates.
American consumer appears to be at a breaking point (as their credit is drying up). They decrease spending and earnings tumble. Earnings tumble and stocks tumble.
The employment numbers are heavily massaged. the Philly Fed had a piece in this that the numbers aren’t consistent. MoM there have been large unlikely beats (eg six sigma). That doesn’t happen naturally. It’s rigged via adjustments.
Can you explain more on the geopolitical reordering and third World Wars fears? I agree the current events strain belief in a continuing Pax Americana. But I really don't know what happens next.
I see the Ukrainian conflict as similar to the Spanish civil war, with other powers arming and watching to see how the technology and weapons work in actual warfare, and taking notes for the future. It feels a like such a bigger event than anything else scale-wise; and now Hamas attacking Israel has the potential to further draw international divisions.
IMO, we are moving to a multi-polar world with the powers being US, Russia, and China. During this transition the powers are trying to find their place in the new hegemony and we are seeing the areas of friction such as the war in Ukraine and now a looming war in the ME. Our rivals, seeing us weakened, are likely to take the opportunities to strike or make moves for their own position.
The ME is kind of a wildcard IMO as they are not organized, and without a regional polar power, split themselves between US and Russia as protectorates. This conflict has the possibility to provide a unifying rallying cry for the Arab states. You can see the reshuffling of the cards now with the diplomatic disposition of Saudi Arabia and Jordan to name a few.
Again IMO, I think this is signalling the end of Pax Americana and our leadership is just not capable of realizing it. Russia will win and gain some clout, some ME countries will throw off the yoke of the US, and I await a Chinese flex. I'm not sure exactly how things will play out but it seems like something is going to happen in these calamitous geopolitical environments.
we are moving to a multi-polar world with the powers being US, Russia, and China.
Russia? Are you serious? Freaking EU is more powerful, after taking into account that it is amorphous blob of various countries.
Russia is flailing in war against its former vassal. Yes, Ukraine has some supplies from USA, other former Russian vassals and NATO, plus some bonuses.
An increasingly centralized EU could be a world power if it takes the direction that the US did early on and gradually become a single state. Barring that, no single EU state is powerful enough to qualify, and too restrained by the rest of the EU to flex the requiref muscles.
Russia will likely be more of a regional power than a world power, I agree. However, do not underestimate the psychological impact that backing the losing horse has on international opinion. Ukraine will likely lose the war, which means Team USA lost the war.
Doesn't matter how costly it was to Russia, it demonstrates that even very heavy US backing doesn't protect you against even a dysfunctional regional power, which means many smaller states will look elsewhere, such as forming their own regional blocks.
Ukraine will likely lose the war, which means Team USA lost the war.
maybe, but Russia will not get more powerful as result of that adventure. Maybe if Ukraine would unconditionally surrender today they would end ahead in total, but soon even that would not help. And in more realistic scenarios it is unqualified disaster for Russia even if they will declare mission accomplished in the end.
Russia will not get more powerful as result of that adventure
No, but they will acquire 62,000 sq mi of land that is better than most of the land that they currently possess. And the cost is what? Weapons that would have expired anyway? Some consumer goods shortages for things that no population actually needs to begin with? 180,000 men? That's only 3 men per square mile, a hell of a deal! And that of course is leaving out the possibility of Russia winning anything more than it has already gotten.
Maybe there are some more extreme long-term costs that I'm not seeing, but I really don't think so. What move could possibly have better contributed to Russia's long-term overall position.
The problem for Russia is that they have not finished paying costs.
True, but I guess I'm not just expecting their costs to mount much higher without a proportionally larger gain. The front has largely stagnated. Any operations large enough to move the meter would also be liable to shred what's left of Ukraine's fighting population and end with much larger land gains.
Russia is not really having shortage of land, this is not a Singapore.
It's not about square footage, it's about production capability. Major steel manufacturing industries, a very significant chunk of farmland, some of the world's larger lithium deposits and (if they can push into Kharkiv province,) significant natural gas deposits. For western countries that are living on their inheritance, things like that aren't too important. For everyone else, resource extraction is vital. Even what they've taken now is a win. In the case of unconditional surrender? It becomes the biggest material win any country has had since World War II.
When thinking about the land gains through conquest, it's worth looking at through a lens of "How much would you have to pay to acquire that area and everything in it minus the people?" There is no way anyone could acquire it cheaper than the price Russia will pay for the war.
Now of course, all of this is predicated on "If they can keep it," but with the combination of nuclear MAD and the unwillingness of any other major powers to step into a full-scale hot war, that seems likely.
An increasingly centralized EU could be a world power if it takes the direction that the US did early on and gradually become a single state. Barring that, no single EU state is powerful enough to qualify, and too restrained by the rest of the EU to flex the requiref muscles.
That's always how the EU, and each step of centralization, was sold. But who knows, maybe superpowerdom is just around the corner.
I mean, it's still a long ways off from being centralized enough. It doesn't even have a single unified military structure. The change a few years ago to be able to take on debt at the federal level was a big move in the right(?) direction though.
I mean, it's still a long ways off from being centralized enough. It doesn't even have a single unified military structure.
for start, idea of EU-as-a-superstate does not even have a clear support
it does not even have well unified goals, and even shared projects to produce weaponry were far from success as different countries have massively different needs and priorities
Right now "single unified military structure" is nonstarter. Though there are some very local unifications.
Well yes, that's the point of the boil-the-frog style gradual centralization. I don't expect them to achieve it anytime soon. More like 100 years from now.
Or something that will end up dragging the continent to the bottom, because the whole structure is corrupt by design. We'll find out eventually, I suppose.
Russia isn't strong enough to be a pole on its own. It's certainly willing to burn a higher share of its economy and exhaust its military stockpiles to punch above its weight, but that's not sustainable in the long run. Like Iran in the ME, it has very few natural allies, which further limits its influence.
This same diatribe has been written every year for the last 70 years. We’ve been in a unipolar world for about 30 years (before that it was still America first for 40 years). We’ve had Israeli Wars before it’s not a new thing. We’ve had oil embargo’s at a time when the US was dependent on importing energy. We’ve had 2 afghan wars. We’ve had Vietnam. We’ve had the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve had third world countries playing a bit of both sides.
Only one thing has begun to change and that’s the rise of China.
The fall of dollar hegemony has been on Bloomberg once a month from some goldbug every month for decades.
I see big geopolitical risks in the next few decades. There is the arrangement the west makes with China on issues. And there is the risks of the west being eaten internally by immigration. A bigger issue for those in Europe who are going to have to deal with Africas population boom and a potential tsunami of immigrant invaders of which they face a real risks of being replaced.
I’ve got a neat little book on my shelf titled “The Future of Conflict in the 1980s”. It was written at the dawn of the Reagan administration. Yes, it basically has the same concerns as @forestboomer.
New areas of friction. New conflicts over energy resources and military basing. The South China Sea was of interest, albeit for different reasons than today. Lots of emphasis on asymmetrical fights, brush wars, the strategy for US interventionism in a changing world.
I’ll have to see about writing it up one of these days.
I would be curious if the Roman Empire had people talking about its imminent collapse constantly. They probably did.
I’ve probably read 50k of the end are near articles. Someday I will be wrong discounting them. It’s most likely not tomorrow. Someone else will look like a genius just like Nouriel Roubini did once. But the genius probably wasn’t a genius and it was just dumb luck.
There are logistical components to this, though. If the gloves fully come off and Israel is in an existential war for survival, they have a lot of advanced weaponry and a large standing army. Most Arab armies are not particularly competent - the skilled fighting forces would be some units of the Syrian army, Hezbollah, possibly some of the IRGC and Hamas, possibly Iraqi Shia militias (although they’d have to keep many forces at home), maybe some Jordanians although my guess is they’d limit their involvement. I doubt Turkey would join a war on Israel because it would distract from the ongoing situation with the Kurds and would involve fighting with Iranians, although I suppose it’s possible. The Egyptian army isn’t built for that kind of war, and as the backbone of Sisi’s power it’s hard to see him committing to an overseas engagement, especially in defense of Hamas which is of course a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot. The Saudis are busy in Yemen and recent peace talks are floundering.
Israel isn’t guaranteed to win against the above by any means, but it’s not certain defeat either.
The Saudis and those countries also clearly want to be allies with the Israeli and its a game of dealing with some Jewish hate in Islam and their PMC viewing Israel as a very useful ally.
To me what you described seems like a multi-proxy, insurgency war within or near to the borders of Israel which is very sobering to think about. You're right though perhaps I am being too much of a doomer in regards to Israel's ability to fight this conflict, even a regional one. I think however, the idea or era of Zionism is over. As in, Israel has used all of it's grace and the global community might even make Israel give up concessions for a lasting peace.
I was alive then and it's nothing like post 9/11. A lot of people are criticizing Israel and US foreign policy in the ME right now. That definitely wasn't happening after 9/11. Also, there is a lot more sympathy for Muslims now, especially on the Left. A war for Israel would be extremely unpopular.
Me too, and I admit that the initial vibe was pretty well captured by The Onion's "We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage" debate. Bill Maher got bumped from ABC for saying a suicide attack wasn't "cowardly", because "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a textbook example of the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, it was just something Real Americans should bellyfeel.
That definitely wasn't happening after 9/11.
Depends on how long you define "after" to mean. It started happening faster than the wars did.
There was some "Voter March"/"No Blood For Oil" protest on 9/12 that only attracted a thousand protesters ... but by the time the reaction to 9/11 was clearly in motion it was attracting the largest anti-war rally in history.
What an absolute soycuck tier shit to say and feel as if you've said something profound. I've lost the last bit of respect I didn't even know I still had for Bill Maher.
I just looked it up and at one point afterwards George Bush had a 92% approval rating. I would say that is pretty different from now. Obviously you can find examples of people disagreeing, but objective measures like polling and voting show it was a much different time. That link you posted was a year and a half after 9/11.
Yeah the Afghanistan war was launched less than a month after September 11 and the rhetoric started pointing that way almost immediately. Bush started by demanding the Taliban hand over Bin Laden or else, they didn't, and the "or else" happened.
I was in college and, at least there anyway, the "we deserved it" talk was immediate, I almost want to say same day. It certainly was not the universal or even the majority opinion but it was sizable and loud.
As a high school junior at the time, my experience largely matches yours. I think 9/11/2001 had too much confusion and fog-of-war for much of a narrative to develop, especially among high school students who were in class (first day of class for my high school, actually!), but by 9/12 and certainly by 9/13, the narrative of "What did we do wrong to deserve this?" or "What did we do to drive these people to such desperation that they felt they had no choice but to lash out in this way?" were very popular, both among students and teachers.
George Bush had like a 92% approval rating. I'm sure there were Marxists and libertarians on college campuses at that time who said we deserved it but the vast majority of people were pissed off and wanted blood.
It seems funny in hindsight, but over the full 8 year terms, George W. Bush had a higher average weekly approval rating (49.4) than Barack Obama (47.9), largely based on the year or so after 9/11. In some ways, it seems like an example of how recency bias clouds expectations. But also that average approvals have been trending downward since the end of the Cold War -- perhaps indicative of larger trends of growing partisanship.
The area is geographically important and israel has made it clear that they will seek to expand their borders to the point where they have days warning of an invasion rather than hours if support is withdrawn. The US likes the Suez canal being open and sees it as one of our great international missions.
Another question, possibly illuminating, is why is the US so closely aligned with Jordan? We prop them up even more, if I'm not mistaken.
My guess would be that we have to separate our view of our strategic relationship with Israel today from our strategic relationship in the 60's and 70's when we were more reliant on the oil it's access and defense and that is the relationship that defines where we are today. Likely, once all the Boomers are out of government and it's run by Millenials and Zoomers, we'll care about a different set of global priorities. I almost choked to death on my coffee trying to imagine that world, but it's inevitable.
Jordan is one of the few sane and livable places left.
If there is eventually Kurdistan it may also become one (i really wish it to the kurds, but chances are between 0 and me getting married to Sofia Vergara lookalike)
There's two allies to the West in the Middle East: Israel and the various monarchs, emirs etc., as a group. Jordan belongs to the latter category.
What do these have in common? They stand as a fundamental stopgap to something that would really threaten Western interests: Arab unification, first advocated by secular Arab nationalists like Nasser and then by Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel, by its sheer existence, means that you can't unite North Africa (or at least Egypt) with the Middle East, and the petty monarchs are not about to accept a solution where they are no longer a monarch.
"Israel, both implicitly and explicitly, works as one part of a project to stop the formation of an united Arab/Muslim state, which would be able to exert huge influence through its control of oil" is a considerably better explanation for why the West keeps sticking up with Israel instead of Arabs (apart from the monarchs and whatever other allies the West can scrounge up) than Zionists just hypnotizing the West to do something completely irrational with no benefit to itself. Sure, the Zionist movements in the West (Jewish and Christian) play a role, but there are also actual geopolitical reasons.
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
Jordan and Israel represent the two sides of the Middle Eastern coin as envisioned by the British orientalists of the early 20th century, whose role America eventually partially took over.
On one side were the Jews, mostly shtetl dwellers and assorted Levantine merchants, led by what was hoped to be a more civilized caste of Western European types, raised and educated in England and to a lesser extent France, who were first-rate supporters, much like the Scots, of Empire. Cecil Rhodes himself was, after all, an agent of the Rothschild family, and every early piece of lobbying by wealthy Anglo-French Jews for Israel was predicated on it being an outpost of Europe in the Orient.
The flipside of the coin was that many British and French aristos were themselves inheritors of a long tradition of orientalism, involving variously dashing Arab swordsmen, ancient desert customs, camels, the honor and nobility of a tribal culture, fanatic devotion to victory and God and so on. As the 19th century and early 20th centuries dragged on, the British were increasingly successful at having the heirs to various Middle Eastern monarchies sent to Eton and Sandhurst (quite a number still are). Jordan to some extent represents the epitome of this, the King is literally half British and descended from the colonial officer class on his mother’s side.
As the Middle East fell apart after Suez and the Americans realized the gravity of their mistake in not more vigorously opposing Nasser (which triggered a series of events that ultimately convinced the inhabitants of the region that they were once again in control of their destinies), the US tried, for various reasons, to shore up what was left.
On both sides of the coin though, the idea was that the respective ‘non-western’ aspects of the relevant cultures could be managed appropriately by Britain and eventually the US as successor state, and that it was best to keep the ‘good sort’ of person in charge, the kind who knew the etiquette at the right kind of Pall Mall club, or maybe at a DC charity gala. History may have disabused us of this notion, but it was a long time in the making.
Israel is simply one of the more stable and reliable partners in the Middle East, and it’s worth putting up with some lip to keep them that way. Of course, it helps that our enemies are by and large also their enemies.
There’s also the democracy angle- Israel is the only functioning democracy in the region and lots of the deep state genuinely mean what they say about supporting democracy around the world.
and lots of the deep state genuinely mean what they say about supporting democracy around the world.
Press X to doubt. Are we talking about the same deep state that believes in "democracy" and "fighting misinformation" but only when they get their way? How about that deepstate that can't help itself dethrone democratically elected leaders for purely monetary (even banana republic tier) and geopolitical goals?
Iran is our enemy primarily because they choose to be, not because we oppose them for opposing Israel. Syria is our enemy primarily for siding with Russia, and a lot of the armed groups Israel is busily repressing are our enemy because their friends blew up some buildings 20 odd years ago.
No, I’m pretty sure Iran and friends figured out that Western modernity was a good bogeyman, even without Israel’s help. There were two superpowers to choose from, and we were blasting sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in their general direction. Why wouldn’t fundamentalists decide that this was the work of the Devil?
I’m not trying to argue the merits of one culture vs. another. It’s the ingroup/outgroup status that matters. We were the obvious outside threat. If you were a disaffected young man looking for someone to blame, we’d set ourselves up perfectly for you.
Iran was actually diplomatically isolated for the first decade or so after the revolution, IIRC, and both superpowers backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Continued US messing in the Middle East is probably why Iran continues to be our enemy even after they made nice with Russia, but that has as much to do with oil as it does Israel.
The reason comes down to 2 things primarily. (1) Evangelicals don’t want Israel in Muslim hands and something about end days occurring with Jewish ownership. (2). 5 of the top 10 wealthiest Americans were Jewish (Zuck, Page, Brin, Ellison, Bloomberg). Around 17% of American billionaires are Jewish. Before Affirmative Action 20% plus of Ivy graduates were Jewish. Let’s just say money and PMC have a lot of Jews. So they matter when they want to.
If you assume the average Jewish extended family has 30 members. There’s about 150-170 Jewish billions. The US has around 6 millions. The average Jew has a 1 in a 1000 chance of their rich uncle/grandpa being a billionaire.
If we didn't support Israel the state would have likely fallen to Soviet-aligned AK-wielders. With our support Israel remains America-aligned and IWI-equipped.
Cold War checks on Communist expansion have momentum.
It remains the case that any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles. It is also indisputably the case, as has often been said, that if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were to lay down their arms, there would be peace in Palestine, while if Israel were to lay down her arms, the Israelis would be slaughtered.
At some level, I'll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me — how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.
That just takes us back to Steve-1 and Steve-2, though. The Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It's an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I'd like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.
There's an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I'll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.
So there are a few reasons:
There's a cultural link between Israel and America. Gaza is culturally more alien than it's western supporters like to admit.
The USSR switched it's support to Muslims in the ME. After that Israel became a firm ally during the cold war and after.
Groups like Hezbollah are fundamentally enemies of the west. The end of Israel would free them up for other tasks and put the west in more danger, not less.
It's an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I'd like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.
John Derbyshire most likely cannot live in Israel or among a representative sample of Israelis any more than he can live among immigrants to the West he hates so much.
I increasingly suspect that the only correct decision for any sane person is converting to Judaism or at the very least relinquishing any claim to being white, because Christian whites are just brain-damaged and cannot tell a universalist ideology (even "nationalism") from a population's game-theoretically advantageous modus operandi. Strong vibe of round-headed Slavic Hitlerists.
It is absurd to assume that a more competent entity sharing your material interests is your ally rather than a competitor.
John Derbyshire most likely cannot live in Israel or among a representative sample of Israelis any more than he can live among immigrants to the West
That depends, presumably, on why he hates the immigrants (in Derbyshire’s case the answer is surely every conceivable reason, but still). I recall your comment about Germans and Turks, something about the older generation’s general anti immigrant position being itself a rather thinly veiled “just don’t like ‘em” racial revulsion, in your opinion.
But I don’t know that all European anti-immigrant sentiment is such. Much is a more general aesthetic reaction to crime, squalor, poor upkeep of homes (especially exteriors), unappealing dress and so on. Israel has plenty of all of the above (part of my complaints about it last month, or whenever that was), but there is enough Western civilization left in parts for an expat to find a decent life, provided, probably, that he can learn Hebrew.
I increasingly suspect that the only correct decision for any sane person is converting to Judaism or at the very least relinquishing any claim to being white, because Christian whites are just brain-damaged
I am tempted to go to church right now purely out of spite.
Wtf is this nonsense and laziest possible name calling?
When you think of the modern rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948 and the re-gathering of millions of Jewish people to Israel” 80% say these events were fulfillments of Bible prophecy that show we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ
45% say that the Bible has most influenced their opinions about Israel
I don't think they're that influential on American foreign policy. How many evangelicals did Biden or Obama have in their administration? How many people working in the state department are evangelicals? I would expect a country dominated by evangelicals to look a lot different than the US does now.
Why do you skip the Trump administration, which had numerous Evangelicals in high positions? Why do you ignore the Bush II admin, which had a professed Evangelical as CiC? I understand that they are out of office, but their commitments to Israel shaped the relationship that exists today. To say nothing of the Senate, which shapes foreign policy appropriations and diplomacy in critical ways, where numerous evangelicals sit and twice that many have to carefully consider the evangelical vote when making choices.
I skipped them because if Evangelicals were responsible for the US backing Israel to the hilt on nearly every single issue then you would expect that to reverse when they aren't in power, but that isn't the case. Politicians who don't need a single Evangelical vote still support Israel. Pelosi said that if the Capitol building crumbles to the ground the one thing that will remain will be America's commitment to Israel, I don't see how the Evangelicals could be influential enough to make a top Democrat say that. The US isn't just allied to Israel, we have a bizarre, obsessive devotion that we don't have towards any other country and Evangelicals don't have the influence they'd need in the media or bureaucracy to achieve that.
First off the common "Evangelical end of days" excuse is nonsense.
It was taught at my Southern Baptist church growing up when I was a believer, was also popularized by the Left Behind series, and multiple members of my family think this war is the start of the Rapture. It's not uncommon to see Israeli flags flying next to the American and Protestant flags at SBC churches.
The versions I've heard have all relied on the Temple having been rebuilt. So you get various arguments about how actually Al-Aqsa isn't quite on the same location as the Temple so it could totally be rebuilt next to the mosque. But until that actually happens, I don't see how the end times prophecies can possibly be viewed as relevant to today, even on their own terms.
The longer this world goes on, the more of the sinners who can be saved.
While the actual end result is a total victory, the time just before that is expected to be horrific beyond anything that humanity has ever experienced. Most people don't want to go through that sooner than necessary.
I'd say that there have existed some people in the Evangelical movement that literally have believed the "support Israel to immanentize the Eschaton" theory, and these people and their efforts have created a wider understanding that being an Evangelical means supporting Israel, even among the Evangelicals who don't share that particular theory. This is something that's quite visible in Finland, where outright pro-Israeli views have been pretty rare (before now, at least) among the wider society, but the one, rather small sector of the society that has been visibly fervently pro-Israeli have been the Evangelicals.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. - Lucifer, Paradise Lost.
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether
be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say.
Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playingprosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic.
I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
"An ethnically homogeneous society isn't a utopia, it'll still have problems, so why even bother?"
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do?
Not following, here.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God.
Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens of Israel suddenly disappeared
They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better
I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be. The means to achieving these objectives might change, but the objectives themselves would not.
The term value-rational does not, of course, mean that the values expressed by such behavior are necessarily laudable. Indeed, the values in question may range from pure pride or prejudice (vis-à-vis some groups or belief systems) to goals such as dignity, self-respect, and commitment to a group or a set of ideals. Likewise, value-rational acts can range from long-run sacrifices for distant goals to violent expressions of prejudice or status.
What's up with Senate passing a resolution affirming support for Israel 97-0? As a flyover pleb I'm genuinely confounded by this. I do not give a single shit about either Palestinians and Israelis, and I honestly have a negative feeling towards both of them since I'm pretty sure they would abuse me if I lived in there country and they probably despise my race/religion/way of life. My preferred response to such a proposed resolution by my elected officials would be "lol who cares," but somehow nearly everyone across the entire political spectrum feels either conviction or pressure to signal support for one side of this ugly foreign conflict.
What's going on here? I know there's the "Jews secretly control the government" thesis, but a massive global conspiracy has never seemed like the most parsimonious explanation. What's the motivation of, say, a senator from Mississippi or Oregon to affirm their support? My hunch is that the political calculus is simply that "supporting" Israel bears little to no political costs, whereas opposing/ignoring Israel might have a remote risk of negative publicity or loss of campaign funding.
My hunch is that the political calculus is simply that "supporting" Israel bears little to no political costs, whereas opposing/ignoring Israel might have a remote risk of negative publicity or loss of campaign funding.
That's just kicking the question back though isn't it? Sure, politicians support Israel because opposing them has negative consequences but why is that the case?
I think this vote in particular is pretty meaningless, any nominal ally would get a vote of support after a major terrorist attack. But it's more puzzling why stuff like AOC opposing iron dome funding (until she caved and voted present) is so far outside the overton window. We can't agree on almost anything else but when it comes time to give money to Israel it passes with a supermajority.
What kick-starts the end times into motion is Israel’s political boundaries being reestablished to what God promised the Israelites according to the Bible,” Pastor Nate Pyle told Newsweek in January. This is not an uncommon view.
The LifeWay poll found that 80 percent of evangelicals believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ’s return.
There's no Muslim lobby to worry about by comparison.
I honestly have a negative feeling towards both of them since I'm pretty sure they would abuse me if I lived in there country and they probably despise my race/religion/way of life.
I don't know about Palestine, but that is a very odd thing to say about Israel.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
reactionary_peasant 6mo ago
I know there's the "Jews secretly control the government" thesis, but a massive global conspiracy has never seemed like the most parsimonious explanation.
How about "there is a huge Zionist lobby, and Near East policy is minor enough in American politics to be captured"? I agree that that sort of influence couldn't be done without people knowing about it, but AIPAC's existence isn't a secret.
Foreign policy is a thing, and Israel is one of the US' most steadfast allies outside of the Anglosphere and the #1 ally in the Middle East, modulo oil and weapons deals with the Saudis.
There is also the question of shared values. Liberal democracies are natural allies, unlike the rest of the Middle East.
It has very little to do with religion or ethnicity, IMHO.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
Nwallins 6mo ago
Israel is one of the US' most steadfast allies outside of the Anglosphere and the #1 ally in the Middle East,
It's also the US' most poisonous ally; the alliance with Israel is the whole reason the US has problems in the Near East. Osama bin Laden explicitly cited that alliance as his motive for the Twin Towers. And, y'know, there have been multiple instances of Israel selling US weapons to the PRC.
And, y'know, there have been multiple instances of Israel selling US weapons to the PRC.
This is a good criticism. Lead with this next time.
Osama bin Laden explicitly cited that alliance as his motive for the Twin Towers.
"Why aren't we doing what the mass murderers want!?", on the other hand, is not a good criticism. Bad game theory, bad morality, really undercuts any presumption of objectivity. A lot of jihadi ideology traces back to Qutb getting pissy about dancing; should we ban subversive media like "Footloose" to keep them appeased?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
roystgnr 6mo ago
Just saying: it's not much of a benefit that Israel helps out with Near East conflicts, when we would have avoided both Afghanistan and Iraq had the US not been allied to Israel.
Not a particular incident. Just general complaint that sometimes American women smile at men looking at them. I can't find the quote now.
The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it.
Which is not the quote I was looking for, but shows his opinion regarding American women. And of course this is the 1950s, so he meant to say you can see the shape of the lower part of their legs beneath their skirts covered in high stocking so no skin is showing.
Also while looking for that quote I found that the American town Qutb lived in outlawed alcohol. So he was indeed radicalized going to church social events and high school wrestling matches in a dry town in the 50s.
I took a political science class long ago back when I was in college. The professor (somewhat humorously) presented a darker take on this. Claiming that liberal democracies gang up on and attack non-liberal-non-democracy countries and wage endless war to make the current global order.
Chicago school professors to the right of you, CIA-backed Army-Ranger-trained death squads to the left.
Or as Dylan put it, Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
Democracy has always implied significantly more than just voting in the western understanding. Variously it has included Capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, secularism.
The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state
Does Gaza not already count as a Palestinian state? Ignoring the blockade, they have sovereignty.
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Israel imposes curfews on Palestinians, Palestinians don't have freedom of movement, and Israel apparently has the power to turn off their electricity and water at will. How can Gaza be said to have sovereignty?
I didn't know about the curfews, or the freedom of movement. Could you tell me more about the freedom of movement? Are they not allowed to move throughout Gaza, or do you just mean that they can't leave Gaza? Because the latter is just sensible border policy.
Believe me, I'd read about this if I knew where to find reliable information.
Freedom of movement refers to Palestinians within Gaza not being allowed to get to the West Bank (and vice verse), and within the West Bank being forced to go through Israeli military check points. That also is how the curfew is imposed, mostly within the West Bank since 2005.
Even so, just the blockade and the fact that Israel can cut off electricity and water are enough to call the de facto "sovereignty" of Gaza into question.
If they only do it when the government isn't cooperating with them to uncover the identities of mass murderers, then it doesn't seem like a problem to me, but you're right that it does call their sovereignty into question.
I think the military checkpoints are more meaningful examples: being vulnerable to blockade and international electricity/water shipments describes a lot of places everyone considers states with sovereignty.
YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
Fair, the typical Harvard going brown person is pretty woke.
I might be in a bubble. My circles are first gen immigrants, STEM-school MIT/GATech types or fans of geopolitics who have a less rosy view of conflict resolution than the average starry-eyed liberal. We're past our 18-25 angry-youth phase.
Anecdotes as just anecdotes...But,
Even at their worst, my Muslim friends had "We can condemn the attacks by Hamas, while still caring for Palestine" style takes. Their response to the Gaza invasion is despair, but I have yet to see the "Israel is evil" style takes that I'm seeing from the left and middle-eastern protestors. One of my Muslim friends was humble enough to acknowledge that their biases on the Palestine issue were wrong.
The liberal Hindus around me are smart enough to not outright say it, but they have coloring their speech with a Israel-sympathetic bias.
Your point still holds though. I steer clear of the Ivy-league types, so I might just be insulated from the worst of them.
If Israel were to give citizenship to Palestinians, all that would change is that it would become a civil war.
The Palestinians do not want to share the land with the Jews. Whether one state or two states or three states doesn't matter. Rights and citizenship don't matter. They don't want to share the land with the Jews and they don't want to compromise. Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Or capitulation -- that is, removing all the Jews without killing them all. But that's obviously unacceptable to Israeli Jews and is terrible game theory as well.
There is zero evidence that any substantial portion of Gen Z is becoming more socially conservative / rightist in the US. The vast majority of polling suggests zoomers are the most progressive, most socially liberal generation ever. Less than half are (non-hispanic) white.
What is happening is that a small minority of young white men are being radicalized online into far right politics. This isn’t even close ‘most’ young white men, and actually even if look at regular republicans support is closer than for white men of any other age group (from 2022):
“Even young white men, who had been the subgroup most likely to vote GOP, this time preferred Democrats by a slim margin (49% voted for a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, compared to 45% who voted for a Republican candidate).”
Most young white male republicans are just from conservative states or regular evangelical Christians, not (anything close to) ‘dissident right’. And young white men are like 25% of Gen Z, by the way, and by far the most conservative demographic in that grouping.
If Gen Z is turning against Israel and Zionism, it’s because of generic progressivism and anti-colonialist education / critical race theory / Chris Rufo reasons, not because they follow Keith Woods on Twitter.
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
It strikes me as deeply cynical that the nation with the most obligation to do well by them is the one that a huge swath of the Islamic world considers the great evil.
How much of current homicidal anti-Semitic sentiment across the Islamic world is because Jews settled Palestine? I can understand if they think Israel has to atone for this, but I suspect Palestine is simply a wedge issue that the Islamic world considers useful ammunition against Jews.
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
There's the obvious self-interested explanations. But it's also worth remembering that they did take in refugees before and the seeming result is that they'll never go back.
This is not just a civil war or natural disaster. It's an ethnic struggle for land.
There's a real fear that taking them as refugees not only saddles you with a poor population infiltrated with troublesome radicals, but that it creates an incentive for certain people to seek a more permanent solution to the Palestinian issue.
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[citation needed] that what Israel government is doing is worse than what Hamas doing, and more deserving sanctions/invasion.
That is a dumb reason to be in support, and expecting that such thing would be net financial gain is hilarious. Are you aware that Israel has nuclear weapons?
EDIT: author proposed to expel Jews from Israel and sell all their property. For some weird reason they implied that it would be a good idea, and that it would overall have profits.
I'm not that person but as of writing:
Palestinian dead: 3,785
Israeli dead: 1,300
So by that objective measure Israel has killed more and is therefore "worse," if killing is a problem worth condemning. And that ratio is sure to get worse. Surely some of those Palestinian dead are children and attractive under 40 women, if that helps. To put it more provocative (honest) and bluntly, Israelis/Jews are the more prolific merciless baby killers. They just objectively are.
I personally always keep that stat in mind whenever I see someone try to pull the "omg atrocities" sympathy card by counting bodies. A bizarre play for Israeli siders because the Palestinians will always have the Israelis beat in an oppression and body count olympics. It only really makes sense for Jewish chauvinists that genuinely believe a Jewish life is more valuable than a goy, but most that pull said card aren't so it remains bizarre to me.
For start:
And in my opinion deliberate murder of 1000 random civilians is much worse than 1000 civilians dying as collateral damage because terrorists setup weapon storage in apartment buildings.
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It's just bait going to get someone to say it's bad to do that to Jews so he can cite to someone saying it's good to do to Arabs, then jerk himself off about Jewish conspiracies or something.
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84wpmtyper's proposal was to expel all the Jews from Western countries while taking their wealth ("each American should get $10k from this!"), put them all in Israel, then cut off Israel from "all trade and cooperation" and have Iran deal with them. Basically an alternate, softened version of what the nazis did.
He has since private messaged me twice, claiming I misrepresented his post (I didn't), and that he fears for his life when he speaks out against the Jews. I'm assuming this is more bait.
I second the suggestion to ban 84wpmtyper if he carries on.
Oh, sorry for misrepresenting their shizoposting. Still, my comments apply.
If anything, nazis were at least more honest what they are trying to achieve.
yeah, bait. If they are sending this stuff it would be a good idea to preserve his life and ban him from speaking on this topic :)
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Assuming you're not outright trolling, a glance over your brief post history here suggests that you have not yet really grasped the spirit of the rules.
This is not the place to wage the culture wars; this is the place to discuss them with people who disagree with you. That means making your claims less-than-maximally-inflammatory, furnishing evidence in proportion to how inflammatory they are, speaking about specific rather than general groups, writing in a way that invites everyone to participate in the conversation, not building consensus or recruiting for a cause, and so on. Your post should evidence some measure of asking yourself "why do I believe what I believe" and "what would it take to change my mind?"
Basically, please don't post like this.
It is now deleted. Maybe post author should be banned next time they do this?
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This makes me more curious as to what the post actually was.
I can still see it. Can't you?
Yeah it's gone now. He (not sure if I should mention who it was) suggested that the West should expel all Jews, seizing their assets and concentrating them in Israel, cut them off from all trade and set Iran against them.
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I see it now. When I first hopped into this thread, it just said "filtered"
And after reading it, it kinda made me want to reply in a way that may be skirting the rules. I almost think it's a false flag comment. That's how outside the overton window it is.
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Might Turkey join the fight against Israel? Former US Colonel Douglas Macgregor thinks they might. Obviously this would be horrible for Israel, the US, and NATO. Does anyone understand what is happening in Turkey well enough to know if this is a possibility?
Turkey is more likely to attack Greece than Israel (and it’s not very likely to attack Greece).
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Of course not, don’t be silly.
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This is the same Macgregor that's been predicting Russian forces having free run of all Ukraine east of the Dniepr Real Soon Now for the entire duration of the war? The one whose consulting firm got casualty and death estimates wrong by a factor of (E: at least) four? The one who likes to plug gold?
Yeah I don't think his thoughts are worth much. Maybe as some kind of entropy source for a prototype AI tasked with writing movie plots?
I think we will only know the real casualty predictions at the end of the war
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General observation, not connected to Macgregor's current comments, but throughout the Ukraine War it has blown my mind how many of these pro-Russian pundits have been incredibly, flagrantly, continuously wrong in their predictions and continue to be cited by the cynical, oh-so-world-weary geopolitically aware independent thinkers again and again as if nothing had happened.
I'm actually a little surprised that someone hasn't tried to displace him to cash in on his silliness with an aggressive article like "Sit Down Mr Macgregor, It's Time to Stop Talking". Maybe there's enough grifting niches out there that there's no need to usurp an incumbent, just set up your own pitch next door? Maybe it's unexpectedly high risk and an attacker needs to build a network of allies before making an attempt? Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes - there was that one guy who became "the global expert on Moldbug", with more than enough material to discredit his theories, and he didn't make a move. Maybe it's easy to take someone down, but uncertain that you'll be the one to pick up the freed niche.
Presumably there's people willing to say a message - they may even believe it! - and people who want that message said, and a finite budget allocated to getting those things said. Or maybe there's a finite amount of attention in the world to hear the mess. In either case it seems like, assuming there's an equilibrium to disrupt by discrediting someone already in the ecosystem, there's money to be made. So why hasn't someone made a move? What are the dynamics of this grift economy?
this is one for me
Yes, I would spends weeks on writing down why specific pro-Russian idiot is wrong, maybe someone would read it, and then what?
Effort/benefit ratio is worse than for many others things can do, including watching funny videos of cats. Not to say about some things that I could do where I am already sort-of established in position of some (very minor) importance.
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This has been how the constant "Russia is about to run out of money/missiles/vodka/conscripts" articles have read to me, too. I see people citing sources which claimed the Russians would have run out of materiel last year and people just don't seem to care that they were outputting unadulterated fiction not even a month ago.
Sure, that's stupid too, but the Western pro-Russians very specifically tend to pride themselves as independent thinkers who aren't just platitude-repeating NPCs like the "Reddit" pro-Ukrainians, so the incongruency tends to look bigger to me.
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In contrast to Bellendcat, which predicted Russia running out of PGMs for months in 2022. Or all the people who predicted this years's offensive would smash the Russians.
In general I'd say most of the people doing predictions on the war were absolutely off and kept at it.
link? I bet that it as not phrased this way, as it is known that they are producing new PGM
It was Christo Grozev, speaking on UA Tv early in the war.
To be honest, it does seem nobody had a handle on Russian production. They 'run out' of stockpile by summer probably because it wasn't very good. Pentagon 'thought' they wouldn't be able to make new ones because 'sanctions' which turned out to be BS as they're still flying.
Of course, how many are fired, intercepted and hit is hard to say because in Ukraine, they'll arrest you for posting videos of damage on the ground.
We'll see later this year. Russia is unlikely to run out because especially cruise missiles are not very high tech. They use early 1990s electronics. If you have access to Alibaba, you can make all the cruise missiles for which you can get engines and aluminum and man-hours.
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Opens map - checks common border between Turkey and Israel. Closes map.
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The atmosphere right now reminds me a lot of the post 9-11, war on terror vibes. The US is about to get dragged into some middle eastern conflicts by Israel. The propaganda parrots, "patriots", Zionists, and arm chair generals repulse me. The US is led by a geriatric imbecile, our economy is hanging on by a thread, our weapon and oil stockpiles are depleted, our reputation is dwindling and our allies are weak or disappearing. This will not end well for the US. Unfortunately, I think the train has left the station. I hope this will be worth it.
Personally, I think this is the end of Zionism. Public perception has changed and the propaganda doesn't work like it used to. Israel might actually get fucked now. I feel we are in for large societal and cultural changes, as well as a geopolitical reordering if not WW3.
Very unlikely. Biden got us out of Afghanistan which is something Bush, Obama, and Trump all should have done but failed to do. He also ensured no American troops got involved in Ukraine. It's very unlikely that he'll decide to go on a rampage in the Middle East.
It's pretty much the strongest it's ever been. Unemployment is <4%. Stock markets are near all time highs. There's inflation, but that's cooled off significantly to being basically on-target.
Not even close. Some factors (like artillery) that the US doesn't use much of are pretty low, but new shells are always being created. For most other things the US is the same as always since we're not sending them anywhere.
The SPR has little to do with domestic consumption of oil.
The opposite is true. It took a big hit after Iraq, then another moderate hit during Trump, but Biden + Ukraine have gone a ways to repairing it. The chorus of "America is an evil empire" is slowly being drowned out by "America isn't great but the alternative is so much worse".
Both Germany and Japan are rearming. Europe is weaker relatively speaking compared to history since it's been basically just living off its inheritance, but it still has a significant economic footprint.
Nothing except China's actions or a possible civil conflict in the USA would do much to change these things. Certainly not Israel, Palestine, or Iran.
Re economy
Inflation is almost 4%. That’s double target and btw that’s 4% on a hit elevated base.
American consumer appears to be at a breaking point (as their credit is drying up). They decrease spending and earnings tumble. Earnings tumble and stocks tumble.
The employment numbers are heavily massaged. the Philly Fed had a piece in this that the numbers aren’t consistent. MoM there have been large unlikely beats (eg six sigma). That doesn’t happen naturally. It’s rigged via adjustments.
Judging inflation by multiples of the target is goofy since the target is so low in numerical terms. E.g. one could say that in May of 2020 during Trump's tenure that inflation of 0.12% was off the mark by a factor of over 16x. That sounds disastrous and is technically true, but paints an obviously biased picture. A current inflation rate of 3.7 is basically fine since the long term trend has been downward given interest rates.
US wage growth is indeed slowing, but that's just because it was at historical highs for the first half of Biden's tenure. The 3 month moving average of wage increases is still higher today than at any point during Trump's tenure.
Citation needed. There are critiques of headline unemployment numbers like participation rate and marginal attachment rate, but both of those are steady or improving.
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Can you explain more on the geopolitical reordering and third World Wars fears? I agree the current events strain belief in a continuing Pax Americana. But I really don't know what happens next.
I see the Ukrainian conflict as similar to the Spanish civil war, with other powers arming and watching to see how the technology and weapons work in actual warfare, and taking notes for the future. It feels a like such a bigger event than anything else scale-wise; and now Hamas attacking Israel has the potential to further draw international divisions.
IMO, we are moving to a multi-polar world with the powers being US, Russia, and China. During this transition the powers are trying to find their place in the new hegemony and we are seeing the areas of friction such as the war in Ukraine and now a looming war in the ME. Our rivals, seeing us weakened, are likely to take the opportunities to strike or make moves for their own position.
The ME is kind of a wildcard IMO as they are not organized, and without a regional polar power, split themselves between US and Russia as protectorates. This conflict has the possibility to provide a unifying rallying cry for the Arab states. You can see the reshuffling of the cards now with the diplomatic disposition of Saudi Arabia and Jordan to name a few.
Again IMO, I think this is signalling the end of Pax Americana and our leadership is just not capable of realizing it. Russia will win and gain some clout, some ME countries will throw off the yoke of the US, and I await a Chinese flex. I'm not sure exactly how things will play out but it seems like something is going to happen in these calamitous geopolitical environments.
Russia? Are you serious? Freaking EU is more powerful, after taking into account that it is amorphous blob of various countries.
Russia is flailing in war against its former vassal. Yes, Ukraine has some supplies from USA, other former Russian vassals and NATO, plus some bonuses.
An increasingly centralized EU could be a world power if it takes the direction that the US did early on and gradually become a single state. Barring that, no single EU state is powerful enough to qualify, and too restrained by the rest of the EU to flex the requiref muscles.
Russia will likely be more of a regional power than a world power, I agree. However, do not underestimate the psychological impact that backing the losing horse has on international opinion. Ukraine will likely lose the war, which means Team USA lost the war.
Doesn't matter how costly it was to Russia, it demonstrates that even very heavy US backing doesn't protect you against even a dysfunctional regional power, which means many smaller states will look elsewhere, such as forming their own regional blocks.
maybe, but Russia will not get more powerful as result of that adventure. Maybe if Ukraine would unconditionally surrender today they would end ahead in total, but soon even that would not help. And in more realistic scenarios it is unqualified disaster for Russia even if they will declare mission accomplished in the end.
No, but they will acquire 62,000 sq mi of land that is better than most of the land that they currently possess. And the cost is what? Weapons that would have expired anyway? Some consumer goods shortages for things that no population actually needs to begin with? 180,000 men? That's only 3 men per square mile, a hell of a deal! And that of course is leaving out the possibility of Russia winning anything more than it has already gotten.
Maybe there are some more extreme long-term costs that I'm not seeing, but I really don't think so. What move could possibly have better contributed to Russia's long-term overall position.
The problem for Russia is that they have not finished paying costs.
As mentioned "Maybe if Ukraine would unconditionally surrender today they would end ahead in total".
Russia is not really having shortage of land, this is not a Singapore.
True, but I guess I'm not just expecting their costs to mount much higher without a proportionally larger gain. The front has largely stagnated. Any operations large enough to move the meter would also be liable to shred what's left of Ukraine's fighting population and end with much larger land gains.
It's not about square footage, it's about production capability. Major steel manufacturing industries, a very significant chunk of farmland, some of the world's larger lithium deposits and (if they can push into Kharkiv province,) significant natural gas deposits. For western countries that are living on their inheritance, things like that aren't too important. For everyone else, resource extraction is vital. Even what they've taken now is a win. In the case of unconditional surrender? It becomes the biggest material win any country has had since World War II.
When thinking about the land gains through conquest, it's worth looking at through a lens of "How much would you have to pay to acquire that area and everything in it minus the people?" There is no way anyone could acquire it cheaper than the price Russia will pay for the war.
Now of course, all of this is predicated on "If they can keep it," but with the combination of nuclear MAD and the unwillingness of any other major powers to step into a full-scale hot war, that seems likely.
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That's always how the EU, and each step of centralization, was sold. But who knows, maybe superpowerdom is just around the corner.
I mean, it's still a long ways off from being centralized enough. It doesn't even have a single unified military structure. The change a few years ago to be able to take on debt at the federal level was a big move in the right(?) direction though.
for start, idea of EU-as-a-superstate does not even have a clear support
it does not even have well unified goals, and even shared projects to produce weaponry were far from success as different countries have massively different needs and priorities
Right now "single unified military structure" is nonstarter. Though there are some very local unifications.
Well yes, that's the point of the boil-the-frog style gradual centralization. I don't expect them to achieve it anytime soon. More like 100 years from now.
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Or something that will end up dragging the continent to the bottom, because the whole structure is corrupt by design. We'll find out eventually, I suppose.
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Russia isn't strong enough to be a pole on its own. It's certainly willing to burn a higher share of its economy and exhaust its military stockpiles to punch above its weight, but that's not sustainable in the long run. Like Iran in the ME, it has very few natural allies, which further limits its influence.
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This same diatribe has been written every year for the last 70 years. We’ve been in a unipolar world for about 30 years (before that it was still America first for 40 years). We’ve had Israeli Wars before it’s not a new thing. We’ve had oil embargo’s at a time when the US was dependent on importing energy. We’ve had 2 afghan wars. We’ve had Vietnam. We’ve had the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve had third world countries playing a bit of both sides.
Only one thing has begun to change and that’s the rise of China.
The fall of dollar hegemony has been on Bloomberg once a month from some goldbug every month for decades.
I see big geopolitical risks in the next few decades. There is the arrangement the west makes with China on issues. And there is the risks of the west being eaten internally by immigration. A bigger issue for those in Europe who are going to have to deal with Africas population boom and a potential tsunami of immigrant invaders of which they face a real risks of being replaced.
I’ve got a neat little book on my shelf titled “The Future of Conflict in the 1980s”. It was written at the dawn of the Reagan administration. Yes, it basically has the same concerns as @forestboomer.
New areas of friction. New conflicts over energy resources and military basing. The South China Sea was of interest, albeit for different reasons than today. Lots of emphasis on asymmetrical fights, brush wars, the strategy for US interventionism in a changing world.
I’ll have to see about writing it up one of these days.
Yes agree.
I would be curious if the Roman Empire had people talking about its imminent collapse constantly. They probably did.
I’ve probably read 50k of the end are near articles. Someday I will be wrong discounting them. It’s most likely not tomorrow. Someone else will look like a genius just like Nouriel Roubini did once. But the genius probably wasn’t a genius and it was just dumb luck.
Early Christians were pretty insistent about the imminence of the end times.
Here's a fun wiki article, too.
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There are logistical components to this, though. If the gloves fully come off and Israel is in an existential war for survival, they have a lot of advanced weaponry and a large standing army. Most Arab armies are not particularly competent - the skilled fighting forces would be some units of the Syrian army, Hezbollah, possibly some of the IRGC and Hamas, possibly Iraqi Shia militias (although they’d have to keep many forces at home), maybe some Jordanians although my guess is they’d limit their involvement. I doubt Turkey would join a war on Israel because it would distract from the ongoing situation with the Kurds and would involve fighting with Iranians, although I suppose it’s possible. The Egyptian army isn’t built for that kind of war, and as the backbone of Sisi’s power it’s hard to see him committing to an overseas engagement, especially in defense of Hamas which is of course a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot. The Saudis are busy in Yemen and recent peace talks are floundering.
Israel isn’t guaranteed to win against the above by any means, but it’s not certain defeat either.
The Saudis and those countries also clearly want to be allies with the Israeli and its a game of dealing with some Jewish hate in Islam and their PMC viewing Israel as a very useful ally.
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To me what you described seems like a multi-proxy, insurgency war within or near to the borders of Israel which is very sobering to think about. You're right though perhaps I am being too much of a doomer in regards to Israel's ability to fight this conflict, even a regional one. I think however, the idea or era of Zionism is over. As in, Israel has used all of it's grace and the global community might even make Israel give up concessions for a lasting peace.
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I was alive then and it's nothing like post 9/11. A lot of people are criticizing Israel and US foreign policy in the ME right now. That definitely wasn't happening after 9/11. Also, there is a lot more sympathy for Muslims now, especially on the Left. A war for Israel would be extremely unpopular.
Fair enough, certainly more criticism and skepticism now.
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Me too, and I admit that the initial vibe was pretty well captured by The Onion's "We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage" debate. Bill Maher got bumped from ABC for saying a suicide attack wasn't "cowardly", because "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a textbook example of the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, it was just something Real Americans should bellyfeel.
Depends on how long you define "after" to mean. It started happening faster than the wars did.
There was some "Voter March"/"No Blood For Oil" protest on 9/12 that only attracted a thousand protesters ... but by the time the reaction to 9/11 was clearly in motion it was attracting the largest anti-war rally in history.
What an absolute soycuck tier shit to say and feel as if you've said something profound. I've lost the last bit of respect I didn't even know I still had for Bill Maher.
What? His point was it wasn't cowardice.
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I just looked it up and at one point afterwards George Bush had a 92% approval rating. I would say that is pretty different from now. Obviously you can find examples of people disagreeing, but objective measures like polling and voting show it was a much different time. That link you posted was a year and a half after 9/11.
I was too young by then but did Bush already commit to war at the period his popularity was so high?
Yeah the Afghanistan war was launched less than a month after September 11 and the rhetoric started pointing that way almost immediately. Bush started by demanding the Taliban hand over Bin Laden or else, they didn't, and the "or else" happened.
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I was in college and, at least there anyway, the "we deserved it" talk was immediate, I almost want to say same day. It certainly was not the universal or even the majority opinion but it was sizable and loud.
As a high school junior at the time, my experience largely matches yours. I think 9/11/2001 had too much confusion and fog-of-war for much of a narrative to develop, especially among high school students who were in class (first day of class for my high school, actually!), but by 9/12 and certainly by 9/13, the narrative of "What did we do wrong to deserve this?" or "What did we do to drive these people to such desperation that they felt they had no choice but to lash out in this way?" were very popular, both among students and teachers.
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George Bush had like a 92% approval rating. I'm sure there were Marxists and libertarians on college campuses at that time who said we deserved it but the vast majority of people were pissed off and wanted blood.
It seems funny in hindsight, but over the full 8 year terms, George W. Bush had a higher average weekly approval rating (49.4) than Barack Obama (47.9), largely based on the year or so after 9/11. In some ways, it seems like an example of how recency bias clouds expectations. But also that average approvals have been trending downward since the end of the Cold War -- perhaps indicative of larger trends of growing partisanship.
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The area is geographically important and israel has made it clear that they will seek to expand their borders to the point where they have days warning of an invasion rather than hours if support is withdrawn. The US likes the Suez canal being open and sees it as one of our great international missions.
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Another question, possibly illuminating, is why is the US so closely aligned with Jordan? We prop them up even more, if I'm not mistaken. My guess would be that we have to separate our view of our strategic relationship with Israel today from our strategic relationship in the 60's and 70's when we were more reliant on the oil it's access and defense and that is the relationship that defines where we are today. Likely, once all the Boomers are out of government and it's run by Millenials and Zoomers, we'll care about a different set of global priorities. I almost choked to death on my coffee trying to imagine that world, but it's inevitable.
Jordan is one of the few sane and livable places left.
If there is eventually Kurdistan it may also become one (i really wish it to the kurds, but chances are between 0 and me getting married to Sofia Vergara lookalike)
She's getting a divorce so you might not have to settle for a lookalike.
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There's two allies to the West in the Middle East: Israel and the various monarchs, emirs etc., as a group. Jordan belongs to the latter category.
What do these have in common? They stand as a fundamental stopgap to something that would really threaten Western interests: Arab unification, first advocated by secular Arab nationalists like Nasser and then by Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel, by its sheer existence, means that you can't unite North Africa (or at least Egypt) with the Middle East, and the petty monarchs are not about to accept a solution where they are no longer a monarch.
"Israel, both implicitly and explicitly, works as one part of a project to stop the formation of an united Arab/Muslim state, which would be able to exert huge influence through its control of oil" is a considerably better explanation for why the West keeps sticking up with Israel instead of Arabs (apart from the monarchs and whatever other allies the West can scrounge up) than Zionists just hypnotizing the West to do something completely irrational with no benefit to itself. Sure, the Zionist movements in the West (Jewish and Christian) play a role, but there are also actual geopolitical reasons.
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
The Syrian rebels were able to break up UAR with ease precisely because there was a whole-ass country between Egypt and Syria.
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
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Jordan and Israel represent the two sides of the Middle Eastern coin as envisioned by the British orientalists of the early 20th century, whose role America eventually partially took over.
On one side were the Jews, mostly shtetl dwellers and assorted Levantine merchants, led by what was hoped to be a more civilized caste of Western European types, raised and educated in England and to a lesser extent France, who were first-rate supporters, much like the Scots, of Empire. Cecil Rhodes himself was, after all, an agent of the Rothschild family, and every early piece of lobbying by wealthy Anglo-French Jews for Israel was predicated on it being an outpost of Europe in the Orient.
The flipside of the coin was that many British and French aristos were themselves inheritors of a long tradition of orientalism, involving variously dashing Arab swordsmen, ancient desert customs, camels, the honor and nobility of a tribal culture, fanatic devotion to victory and God and so on. As the 19th century and early 20th centuries dragged on, the British were increasingly successful at having the heirs to various Middle Eastern monarchies sent to Eton and Sandhurst (quite a number still are). Jordan to some extent represents the epitome of this, the King is literally half British and descended from the colonial officer class on his mother’s side.
As the Middle East fell apart after Suez and the Americans realized the gravity of their mistake in not more vigorously opposing Nasser (which triggered a series of events that ultimately convinced the inhabitants of the region that they were once again in control of their destinies), the US tried, for various reasons, to shore up what was left.
On both sides of the coin though, the idea was that the respective ‘non-western’ aspects of the relevant cultures could be managed appropriately by Britain and eventually the US as successor state, and that it was best to keep the ‘good sort’ of person in charge, the kind who knew the etiquette at the right kind of Pall Mall club, or maybe at a DC charity gala. History may have disabused us of this notion, but it was a long time in the making.
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Israel is simply one of the more stable and reliable partners in the Middle East, and it’s worth putting up with some lip to keep them that way. Of course, it helps that our enemies are by and large also their enemies.
There’s also the democracy angle- Israel is the only functioning democracy in the region and lots of the deep state genuinely mean what they say about supporting democracy around the world.
Press X to doubt. Are we talking about the same deep state that believes in "democracy" and "fighting misinformation" but only when they get their way? How about that deepstate that can't help itself dethrone democratically elected leaders for purely monetary (even banana republic tier) and geopolitical goals?
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Seeing everything that's been going on, precisely where they are located, my whole life, "stable" is not the word I'd use.
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Their enemies are your enemies primarily because you back them. It's circular reasonig, basically.
Iran is our enemy primarily because they choose to be, not because we oppose them for opposing Israel. Syria is our enemy primarily for siding with Russia, and a lot of the armed groups Israel is busily repressing are our enemy because their friends blew up some buildings 20 odd years ago.
Russia was your enemy for no good reason at all back when Siryan civil war mess started.
American support for Israel was one of key reasons for 9/11 as cited by the organisers.
Granted that this is true, the stupid reasons we had for opposing Russia at the time had nothing to do with Israel.
And 9/11 was partly revenge for American troops on Saudi soil, as much as for Israel.
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No, I’m pretty sure Iran and friends figured out that Western modernity was a good bogeyman, even without Israel’s help. There were two superpowers to choose from, and we were blasting sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in their general direction. Why wouldn’t fundamentalists decide that this was the work of the Devil?
Ah, the "they hate us for our freedom" canard.
More like “for our degeneracy,” I guess?
I’m not trying to argue the merits of one culture vs. another. It’s the ingroup/outgroup status that matters. We were the obvious outside threat. If you were a disaffected young man looking for someone to blame, we’d set ourselves up perfectly for you.
They have a lot of more substantial grievences.
Well, yes.
Grievances other than backing Israel.
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Iran was actually diplomatically isolated for the first decade or so after the revolution, IIRC, and both superpowers backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Continued US messing in the Middle East is probably why Iran continues to be our enemy even after they made nice with Russia, but that has as much to do with oil as it does Israel.
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The reason comes down to 2 things primarily. (1) Evangelicals don’t want Israel in Muslim hands and something about end days occurring with Jewish ownership. (2). 5 of the top 10 wealthiest Americans were Jewish (Zuck, Page, Brin, Ellison, Bloomberg). Around 17% of American billionaires are Jewish. Before Affirmative Action 20% plus of Ivy graduates were Jewish. Let’s just say money and PMC have a lot of Jews. So they matter when they want to.
If you assume the average Jewish extended family has 30 members. There’s about 150-170 Jewish billions. The US has around 6 millions. The average Jew has a 1 in a 1000 chance of their rich uncle/grandpa being a billionaire.
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If we didn't support Israel the state would have likely fallen to Soviet-aligned AK-wielders. With our support Israel remains America-aligned and IWI-equipped.
Cold War checks on Communist expansion have momentum.
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First off the common "Evangelical end of days" excuse is nonsense.
John Derbyshire explains it with his usual bluntness that gets him in trouble: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Britain/flotilla.html
So there are a few reasons:
There's a cultural link between Israel and America. Gaza is culturally more alien than it's western supporters like to admit.
The USSR switched it's support to Muslims in the ME. After that Israel became a firm ally during the cold war and after.
Groups like Hezbollah are fundamentally enemies of the west. The end of Israel would free them up for other tasks and put the west in more danger, not less.
John Derbyshire most likely cannot live in Israel or among a representative sample of Israelis any more than he can live among immigrants to the West he hates so much.
I increasingly suspect that the only correct decision for any sane person is converting to Judaism or at the very least relinquishing any claim to being white, because Christian whites are just brain-damaged and cannot tell a universalist ideology (even "nationalism") from a population's game-theoretically advantageous modus operandi. Strong vibe of round-headed Slavic Hitlerists.
It is absurd to assume that a more competent entity sharing your material interests is your ally rather than a competitor.
That depends, presumably, on why he hates the immigrants (in Derbyshire’s case the answer is surely every conceivable reason, but still). I recall your comment about Germans and Turks, something about the older generation’s general anti immigrant position being itself a rather thinly veiled “just don’t like ‘em” racial revulsion, in your opinion.
But I don’t know that all European anti-immigrant sentiment is such. Much is a more general aesthetic reaction to crime, squalor, poor upkeep of homes (especially exteriors), unappealing dress and so on. Israel has plenty of all of the above (part of my complaints about it last month, or whenever that was), but there is enough Western civilization left in parts for an expat to find a decent life, provided, probably, that he can learn Hebrew.
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I am tempted to go to church right now purely out of spite.
Wtf is this nonsense and laziest possible name calling?
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How is it nonsense?
http://research.lifeway.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Evangelical-Attitudes-Toward-Israel-Research-Study-Report.pdf
Is your claim that this poll does not reflect evangelicals views or is it that evangelicals do not influence American policy?
I don't think they're that influential on American foreign policy. How many evangelicals did Biden or Obama have in their administration? How many people working in the state department are evangelicals? I would expect a country dominated by evangelicals to look a lot different than the US does now.
Why do you skip the Trump administration, which had numerous Evangelicals in high positions? Why do you ignore the Bush II admin, which had a professed Evangelical as CiC? I understand that they are out of office, but their commitments to Israel shaped the relationship that exists today. To say nothing of the Senate, which shapes foreign policy appropriations and diplomacy in critical ways, where numerous evangelicals sit and twice that many have to carefully consider the evangelical vote when making choices.
I skipped them because if Evangelicals were responsible for the US backing Israel to the hilt on nearly every single issue then you would expect that to reverse when they aren't in power, but that isn't the case. Politicians who don't need a single Evangelical vote still support Israel. Pelosi said that if the Capitol building crumbles to the ground the one thing that will remain will be America's commitment to Israel, I don't see how the Evangelicals could be influential enough to make a top Democrat say that. The US isn't just allied to Israel, we have a bizarre, obsessive devotion that we don't have towards any other country and Evangelicals don't have the influence they'd need in the media or bureaucracy to achieve that.
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Sam Harris, whom is now insufferable, has said (ish) that we should listen to what people tell us they believe.
People have trouble believing other people are so absurdly different that they could actually believe X Y or Z ... Smoke evidence be damned.
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It was taught at my Southern Baptist church growing up when I was a believer, was also popularized by the Left Behind series, and multiple members of my family think this war is the start of the Rapture. It's not uncommon to see Israeli flags flying next to the American and Protestant flags at SBC churches.
The versions I've heard have all relied on the Temple having been rebuilt. So you get various arguments about how actually Al-Aqsa isn't quite on the same location as the Temple so it could totally be rebuilt next to the mosque. But until that actually happens, I don't see how the end times prophecies can possibly be viewed as relevant to today, even on their own terms.
The most common version around here seems to be ‘the world ends when Israel falls, so don’t let it fall’.
Given that in Christian eschatology end of world is a total God victory I am confused why postponing would be a good thing.
Unless they believe in apocalypse but not in afterlife as described by Christianity? But that would be weird even for protestants.
Simple:
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TIL that there’s a Protestant flag.
It’s called the ‘Christian flag’ but in practice, it’s the Protestant flag.
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I'd say that there have existed some people in the Evangelical movement that literally have believed the "support Israel to immanentize the Eschaton" theory, and these people and their efforts have created a wider understanding that being an Evangelical means supporting Israel, even among the Evangelicals who don't share that particular theory. This is something that's quite visible in Finland, where outright pro-Israeli views have been pretty rare (before now, at least) among the wider society, but the one, rather small sector of the society that has been visibly fervently pro-Israeli have been the Evangelicals.
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Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
There are two big issues underlying Hamas.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
Polygamy isn’t particularly common in Gaza.
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I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
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It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
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The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
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Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
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Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playing prosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
Jude 1:9.
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I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
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Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
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A self-inflicted problem from head to Ghostly toe if I've ever heard of one.
Yes: That's what's necessary for God to be with us, and He loves us enough to do it.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
Not following, here.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
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This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
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Well…yeah. That is indeed the crux of the matter.
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It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
This doesn't even seem that good even if you are just trying to maximize the number of dead infidels!
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Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
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They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
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But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
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I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
+1
Here is where again I reference value rationality:
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What's up with Senate passing a resolution affirming support for Israel 97-0? As a flyover pleb I'm genuinely confounded by this. I do not give a single shit about either Palestinians and Israelis, and I honestly have a negative feeling towards both of them since I'm pretty sure they would abuse me if I lived in there country and they probably despise my race/religion/way of life. My preferred response to such a proposed resolution by my elected officials would be "lol who cares," but somehow nearly everyone across the entire political spectrum feels either conviction or pressure to signal support for one side of this ugly foreign conflict.
What's going on here? I know there's the "Jews secretly control the government" thesis, but a massive global conspiracy has never seemed like the most parsimonious explanation. What's the motivation of, say, a senator from Mississippi or Oregon to affirm their support? My hunch is that the political calculus is simply that "supporting" Israel bears little to no political costs, whereas opposing/ignoring Israel might have a remote risk of negative publicity or loss of campaign funding.
Is there a more nuanced explanation?
That's just kicking the question back though isn't it? Sure, politicians support Israel because opposing them has negative consequences but why is that the case?
I think this vote in particular is pretty meaningless, any nominal ally would get a vote of support after a major terrorist attack. But it's more puzzling why stuff like AOC opposing iron dome funding (until she caved and voted present) is so far outside the overton window. We can't agree on almost anything else but when it comes time to give money to Israel it passes with a supermajority.
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This has much less to do with Jews than it does with evangelicals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/half-of-evangelicals-support-israel-because-they-believe-it-is-important-for-fulfilling-end-times-prophecy/
There's no Muslim lobby to worry about by comparison.
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It’s this. Frankly I’m surprised 3 senators abstained.
They probably just weren't present.
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I don't know about Palestine, but that is a very odd thing to say about Israel.
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How about "there is a huge Zionist lobby, and Near East policy is minor enough in American politics to be captured"? I agree that that sort of influence couldn't be done without people knowing about it, but AIPAC's existence isn't a secret.
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Foreign policy is a thing, and Israel is one of the US' most steadfast allies outside of the Anglosphere and the #1 ally in the Middle East, modulo oil and weapons deals with the Saudis.
There is also the question of shared values. Liberal democracies are natural allies, unlike the rest of the Middle East.
It has very little to do with religion or ethnicity, IMHO.
It's also the US' most poisonous ally; the alliance with Israel is the whole reason the US has problems in the Near East. Osama bin Laden explicitly cited that alliance as his motive for the Twin Towers. And, y'know, there have been multiple instances of Israel selling US weapons to the PRC.
This is a good criticism. Lead with this next time.
"Why aren't we doing what the mass murderers want!?", on the other hand, is not a good criticism. Bad game theory, bad morality, really undercuts any presumption of objectivity. A lot of jihadi ideology traces back to Qutb getting pissy about dancing; should we ban subversive media like "Footloose" to keep them appeased?
Just saying: it's not much of a benefit that Israel helps out with Near East conflicts, when we would have avoided both Afghanistan and Iraq had the US not been allied to Israel.
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I've contemplated how much of modern jihadi violence can traced back to an adult monitored church youth social event circa 1958. And also every now and then an American woman smiling at an exchange student when he stared at them.
Thanks for the article on this; it's what I was referring to but I was too lazy to find a writeup.
This, on the other hand, isn't ringing any bells for me. Was this an actual "inciting" event? (or multiple events? "now and then"?)
Not a particular incident. Just general complaint that sometimes American women smile at men looking at them. I can't find the quote now.
Which is not the quote I was looking for, but shows his opinion regarding American women. And of course this is the 1950s, so he meant to say you can see the shape of the lower part of their legs beneath their skirts covered in high stocking so no skin is showing.
Also while looking for that quote I found that the American town Qutb lived in outlawed alcohol. So he was indeed radicalized going to church social events and high school wrestling matches in a dry town in the 50s.
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I took a political science class long ago back when I was in college. The professor (somewhat humorously) presented a darker take on this. Claiming that liberal democracies gang up on and attack non-liberal-non-democracy countries and wage endless war to make the current global order.
Chicago school professors to the right of you, CIA-backed Army-Ranger-trained death squads to the left.
Or as Dylan put it, Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
Democracy has always implied significantly more than just voting in the western understanding. Variously it has included Capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, secularism.
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Does Gaza not already count as a Palestinian state? Ignoring the blockade, they have sovereignty.
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Israel imposes curfews on Palestinians, Palestinians don't have freedom of movement, and Israel apparently has the power to turn off their electricity and water at will. How can Gaza be said to have sovereignty?
I didn't know about the curfews, or the freedom of movement. Could you tell me more about the freedom of movement? Are they not allowed to move throughout Gaza, or do you just mean that they can't leave Gaza? Because the latter is just sensible border policy.
Believe me, I'd read about this if I knew where to find reliable information.
Freedom of movement refers to Palestinians within Gaza not being allowed to get to the West Bank (and vice verse), and within the West Bank being forced to go through Israeli military check points. That also is how the curfew is imposed, mostly within the West Bank since 2005.
Even so, just the blockade and the fact that Israel can cut off electricity and water are enough to call the de facto "sovereignty" of Gaza into question.
If they only do it when the government isn't cooperating with them to uncover the identities of mass murderers, then it doesn't seem like a problem to me, but you're right that it does call their sovereignty into question.
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I think the military checkpoints are more meaningful examples: being vulnerable to blockade and international electricity/water shipments describes a lot of places everyone considers states with sovereignty.
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YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
That tells you all you need to know.
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It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
I mean that raises the question of why Harvard Indians are relatively anti-Israel- it’s definitely not the elite consensus.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
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Fair, the typical Harvard going brown person is pretty woke.
I might be in a bubble. My circles are first gen immigrants, STEM-school MIT/GATech types or fans of geopolitics who have a less rosy view of conflict resolution than the average starry-eyed liberal. We're past our 18-25 angry-youth phase.
Anecdotes as just anecdotes...But, Even at their worst, my Muslim friends had "We can condemn the attacks by Hamas, while still caring for Palestine" style takes. Their response to the Gaza invasion is despair, but I have yet to see the "Israel is evil" style takes that I'm seeing from the left and middle-eastern protestors. One of my Muslim friends was humble enough to acknowledge that their biases on the Palestine issue were wrong.
The liberal Hindus around me are smart enough to not outright say it, but they have coloring their speech with a Israel-sympathetic bias.
Your point still holds though. I steer clear of the Ivy-league types, so I might just be insulated from the worst of them.
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If Israel were to give citizenship to Palestinians, all that would change is that it would become a civil war.
The Palestinians do not want to share the land with the Jews. Whether one state or two states or three states doesn't matter. Rights and citizenship don't matter. They don't want to share the land with the Jews and they don't want to compromise. Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Or capitulation -- that is, removing all the Jews without killing them all. But that's obviously unacceptable to Israeli Jews and is terrible game theory as well.
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There is zero evidence that any substantial portion of Gen Z is becoming more socially conservative / rightist in the US. The vast majority of polling suggests zoomers are the most progressive, most socially liberal generation ever. Less than half are (non-hispanic) white.
What is happening is that a small minority of young white men are being radicalized online into far right politics. This isn’t even close ‘most’ young white men, and actually even if look at regular republicans support is closer than for white men of any other age group (from 2022):
Most young white male republicans are just from conservative states or regular evangelical Christians, not (anything close to) ‘dissident right’. And young white men are like 25% of Gen Z, by the way, and by far the most conservative demographic in that grouping.
If Gen Z is turning against Israel and Zionism, it’s because of generic progressivism and anti-colonialist education / critical race theory / Chris Rufo reasons, not because they follow Keith Woods on Twitter.
I don't think it's weirder than anything he's said previously.
For reference: when Kanye West went on his show and said "I admire Hitler," Jones was absolutely flummoxed.
Granted, the face sock that completely concealed Kanye's head probably wasn't helping Jones keep a straight face, but still.
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How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
It strikes me as deeply cynical that the nation with the most obligation to do well by them is the one that a huge swath of the Islamic world considers the great evil.
How much of current homicidal anti-Semitic sentiment across the Islamic world is because Jews settled Palestine? I can understand if they think Israel has to atone for this, but I suspect Palestine is simply a wedge issue that the Islamic world considers useful ammunition against Jews.
There's the obvious self-interested explanations. But it's also worth remembering that they did take in refugees before and the seeming result is that they'll never go back.
This is not just a civil war or natural disaster. It's an ethnic struggle for land.
There's a real fear that taking them as refugees not only saddles you with a poor population infiltrated with troublesome radicals, but that it creates an incentive for certain people to seek a more permanent solution to the Palestinian issue.
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